Certainty Principle

An article has come out that states, people who hold false convictions are better at retaining corrected information.  Researchers have used imaging technology to spy on the brain as it corrects strongly held beliefs, shedding light on how might learn from our mistakes.  This is called hypercorrection, say I ask you what 2+2 is and you say 7.  I say how confident are you, you say highly confident.  Then I tell you the answer is 4.  You are more likely to remember it- not just for a few minutes later but weeks and much much longer.

Scientists reason that in hypercorrection, after people discover that ideas they felt very sure about were not inf fact correct, the surprise and embarrassment they feel makes them pay special attention to alternative responses about which they felt less confident.  People then go on to take the corrected information to heart, learning from their errors.

The findings have implications for educational techniques and theory.  The broadest conclusion we might draw from these findings is that we may have the wrong attitude toward errors.  Throughout society and our educational system, there tends to be an attitude that you don't want people making errors and mistakes during learning.  In order to increase effectiveness of long-term learning and understanding, we should structure instruction and training so that likely errors and misconceptions will come up during the learning process, and use them as opportunities for learning.

Here is the link to the article:http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=certainty-principle-people-who-hold-false-convictions-are-better-at-retaining-corrected-information