Also they could just be overconfident because they are high achievers at the top of their game buoyed by the prospect of producing career defining work.
Yes, there may be some truth in that.
I obviously can't speak for those researchers personally, but the people (professors, post docs, phd students, technicians etc) I encountered in research were quite reserved and humble. Certainly confident, but not what I would call arrogant at all. I do think many professors I encountered in particular have some degree of stubborness and cynicism, which can be good or bad depending on the situation. I also think the professors I came across genuinely had a passion for their work and weren't so interested in acclaim, but rather just ensuring they produce high quality work out of pride and also to ensure future funding is more easily secured.
They utterly fecked up this small test study by the way, some research gimp is defo getting the sack.
The person who collected the samples didn’t realise that some now healthy Covid-19 survivors were also in there as they have donated plasma.
Shouldn’t be possible, but happened. Now they have to do the test all over again after going out to the World with the results. One of the top medical research universities in the World.
You’d almost laugh if it wasn’t so serious.
People make mistakes, it happens. It is extremely easy to sit at home and criticise people who design and carry out experiments. Just because something appears obvious in hindsight, does not mean it was obvious at the point in time. People can also become forgetful, it may well have been obvious to them at the time, but they just forgot because there was so much to consider in a short time frame. At a guess, I imagine there is also an additional pressure to produce results because of the ongoing crisis.
I don't know the situation here but occassionally a mistake or error doesn't impact the main conclusions of a piece of work. It may also be that the rest of the work is still of high quality, that it actually helps lead to the correct answer in the future. The latter can be the case in mathematics, see for example a historical discussion on the development of the proof for Fermat's Last Theorem [
article].