Study Finds Male Med Students Are More Confident, But Less Accurate

Why Is This Important?

Because high degrees of confidence aren’t always the best thing.

Long Story Short

A study found that when answering medical questions, female med students were less certain about their answers, but they were more often correct. Men, on the other hand, displayed a higher level of confidence in their answers, but weren’t as accurate.

Long Story

When handing your health and well-being over to a doctor, confidence has to be one of the most important qualities you look for, right? After all, you wouldn’t want your doctor waffling over medical decisions when your health hangs in the balance. Maybe a little uncertainty is a good thing, though. A new study found that women medical students, who tended to be less confident in their answers to medical questions, also happened to be more correct.

In a letter published in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine, MD/MBA student at New York University School of Medicine Jason Theobald cautioned that a lack of confidence may not necessarily mean a lack of expertise on the part of a physician.

(Also, who gets a combined MD/MBA?)

"There will always be a balance in medicine between running additional diagnostic tests and being reasonably confident about the diagnosis and plan given the (possibly limited) data at hand in a clinical setting," he toldMedPage Today in an email. "As a physician, if you lean too far in either direction you're either incurring additional costs and additional stress for the patient, or you're missing potentially important diagnostic criteria."

Researchers used a database called Osmosis, which consists of 14,000+ user-generated medical questions. After answering questions, users indicate whether they were “sure,” “feeling lucky” of had “no clue.” For the analysis, the researchers looked at 1,021 users (617 men and 404 women) who had answered at least 50 questions.

In terms of accuracy, men and women weren’t far off — women were only slightly more accurate, 61.4% vs. 60.3%. However: While women were less certain on average (women selected “I’m sure 39.5% of the time versus 44.4% for men), they were more accurate when they were sure (80.5% versus 78.3%).

As for why this is, take your pick. A separate study from a couple of weeks ago found men were more likely to be narcissistic than women, so maybe that plays a part. Or, you can choose to look at society and gender roles, and postulate that men are rewarded for confidence and penalized for uncertainty, where the opposite is true for women.

Or maybe it’s none of those things. Either way, your takeaway is that while you can probably trust your doctor, don’t mistake confidence for correctness, and vice versa.

Own The Conversation

Ask The Big Question: Are doctors naturally more prone to being overconfidence?

Disrupt Your Feed: I’m considering switching to a woman MD after learning this…

Drop This Fact: Nearly half of all medical school grads are women, up from just about 20 percent in 1977.

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