Evidence of data and confidence in clinical judgments

The literature about research on people's confidence in their general knowledge has usually reported an overconfidence effect (mean subjective probability is higher than percentage of correct answers) with tasks of moderate and extreme difficulty. With easy tasks it has found the opposite effect: underconfidence. However, there are few studies which analyze the relationship between the subjects' confidence and the way they perceive the task, and even Fewer which examine this question in higher real-life fields, such as those of clinical diagnosis. For the above reasons, we analyzed people's confidence in a specific context: clinical judgments. And we carried out an experiment in order to study the relationship between perceived information in a set of clinical cases and people's confidence in their diagnostic judgment. We found a linear relationship between them.