Technical Knowledge, Prosocial Knowledge, and Clinical Performance of Indian Medical Students

We cross-culturally replicated and extended findings reported by Kell, Motowidlo, Martin, Stotts, and Moreno that technical knowledge and prosocial knowledge have independent effects on performance. In a sample of 196 Indian medical students, we found that prosocial knowledge explains variance in students' clinical performance beyond the variance explained by technical knowledge and technical knowledge explains variance in clinical performance beyond the variance explained by prosocial knowledge. Contrary to findings that American medical students' prosocial inclinations, as reflected in measures of empathy, seem to decline over the course of their medical training (e.g., Hojat, Vergare, Maxwell, Brainard, Herrine, and Isenberg), we found that Indian medical students' prosocial knowledge steadily increased from their third to fifth years of medical study.