Learning Research and Development Center, University of Pittsburgh, 3420 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA, 15260, USA.
Department of Psychology, University of Pittsburgh, 3420 Forbes Ave., Pittsburgh, PA, 15260, USA.
Cogn Res Princ Implic. 2023 Aug 30;8(1):58. doi: 10.1186/s41235-023-00511-z.
Is self-assessment enough to keep physicians' cognitive skills-such as diagnosis, treatment, basic biological knowledge, and communicative skills-current? We review the cognitive strengths and weaknesses of self-assessment in the context of maintaining medical expertise. Cognitive science supports the importance of accurately self-assessing one's own skills and abilities, and we review several ways such accuracy can be quantified. However, our review also indicates a broad challenge in self-assessment is that individuals do not have direct access to the strength or quality of their knowledge and instead must infer this from heuristic strategies. These heuristics are reasonably accurate in many circumstances, but they also suffer from systematic biases. For example, information that feels easy to process in the moment can lead individuals to overconfidence in their ability to remember it in the future. Another notable phenomenon is the Dunning-Kruger effect: the poorest performers in a domain are also the least accurate in self-assessment. Further, explicit instruction is not always sufficient to remove these biases. We discuss what these findings imply about when physicians' self-assessment can be useful and when it may be valuable to supplement with outside sources.
自我评估足以保持医生的认知技能（如诊断、治疗、基本生物知识和沟通技巧）的最新状态吗？我们在保持医学专业知识的背景下，回顾了自我评估的认知优势和劣势。认知科学支持准确评估自己技能和能力的重要性，我们也回顾了几种可以量化这种准确性的方法。然而，我们的综述也表明，自我评估面临的一个广泛挑战是，个体无法直接了解自己知识的强弱，而只能从启发式策略中推断。在许多情况下，这些启发式方法是相当准确的，但它们也存在系统性偏差。例如，当下感觉容易处理的信息会导致个体对未来记忆它的能力产生过度自信。另一个值得注意的现象是邓宁-克鲁格效应：在一个领域表现最差的人也是自我评估最不准确的人。此外，明确的指导并不总是足以消除这些偏差。我们讨论了这些发现对医生何时可以进行有用的自我评估以及何时需要补充外部资源的意义。
