Errors made with high confidence are corrected more reliably than errors made with low confidence, once the right answer is supplied.
The result inverts the intuition that strongly held mistakes are the hardest to shift. Butterfield and Metcalfe found that being wrong while certain produces surprise, and surprise captures attention and improves encoding of the correction. The practical implication for teaching is that a confident wrong answer is a better learning opportunity than a hesitant one.
In practice
- An engineer who was sure about the failure mode and wrong remembers the real cause for years.
- A pupil who shrugs at being corrected retains less than one who was certain and is embarrassed.