Hypercorrection (Psychology)

Hypercorrection is the finding that a person is more likely to correct a mistaken belief about a general-knowledge fact when they originally held that mistaken belief with high confidence than when they held it with low confidence or genuine uncertainty. In the effect's classic illustration, a student who confidently but wrongly answers that Pittsburgh is the capital of Pennsylvania is more likely to remember the correct answer, Harrisburg, after being corrected than a student who had given the same wrong answer without much confidence in it. The pattern was first observed by Raymond W. Kulhavy in 1977 while studying how students responded to corrected test answers, and the psychologists Janet Metcalfe and Brady Butterfield of Columbia University formally named it hypercorrection in a 2001 study; the underlying idea is that an error committed with high confidence is, somewhat counterintuitively, easier to correct through feedback than an error a person was already unsure about.