dan kruger effect, an explainer, sort of

credit cards have personalities. the visa is an older brother, the amex is a friend who shows up late, the mastercard is the cousin who lies about jobs. my dad would have hated all this. at 2 am, however, i decided this was the whole psychology effect, distilled. i told no one. i am telling you.

desk, mid-morning, second coffee colder than the first. carla is upstairs at a training session that, by the agenda i glanced at, is scheduled to outlast the rest of my patience. i have, conservatively, an hour before anyone notices the screen.

the term i kept turning over at 2 am, eyes adjusting to the light from a fridge i’d opened for no reason, was the dan kruger effect. that is not, i should say up front, the spelling of the actual finding. that is a typo with a haircut. the actual finding is the longer pillar piece on the dunning kruger effect, drafted at this same desk on a different morning, and it has the chart and the names and the receipts. this one has dan, who is no one, and a hot take i’ll be defending in five sections.

DAN. IS. NOT. A. RESEARCHER.

dan kruger is no one’s name, but i defend something

the actual paper, which i have not read but feel close to, was written by david dunning and justin kruger. two people. neither of them named dan. dan is what happens when the surname “dunning” passes through an american mouth, an open-plan kitchen, and a cousin who is half-listening because the game is on. the second syllable goes. the first vowel softens. you arrive at dan, which is short, friendly, and exactly the kind of name you’d give the guy at the meeting who is always sure. that is not, on a careful reading, an accident.

each typo of this term is, in my view, a small portrait of who is speaking. the dunn kruger version belongs to a person who skim-read a substack on a sunday and wrote down the four letters they could remember. the don kruger version belongs to mike at the corner bar, who likes one syllable and a hat. and the dan kruger version — this one, the one i’m here for — belongs to the guy in business casual who thinks the term is named after a colleague he worked with at his last firm. dan, in his telling, was very good with budgets. dan, in his telling, owned a boat.

i’m here to defend a take that, on the chart, is exactly the dan kruger move. the take is this: credit cards are a personality trait. i did not invent that take. i hold it. i hold it the way a man at 2 am holds a take — with both hands, badly, in front of an open fridge.

the dan kruger effect hot take, stated plainly

here is the take, on its own, with no clothes on. credit cards are a personality trait. that is the sentence. it is the kind of sentence you can carve into a coaster. it is also, depending on the room, either obvious or a mild act of war.

what i mean by it: the card a person reaches for at the table tells you more than the dinner. the man who pays with the black card has a story about the black card. the woman with two cards in a clip has a story about the clip. the friend who taps the phone, no card visible, has a story about not having a story. there is no neutral hand at the table. there is only the hand and what it has decided.

i have, in my own wallet, a card with a chip that has been in and out of more readers than my apartment door has had keys. the card is, on a careful reading, the most updated thing about me. it is the only object in my life that gets a new physical version every three years. the fridge does not. the seventh microwave will arrive on thursday and become, by friday, an artifact. the card is the only ship of theseus in my drawer. that, by itself, is a personality trait.

watch any meeting where someone has to expense lunch. the card comes out. the way it comes out is the person. brisk and apologetic, slow and proud, casual and unwell — pick one, you’ll know who you sat next to. i have, on three separate tuesdays, watched a man at this same building use a corporate card the way another man would deliver a wedding speech. it was a salad. he tipped on the screen with both hands.

dad once said something about plastic

my dad used to say that plastic was the second worst thing the century invented, the first being the meeting. he said it the way a man says a thing he has been saying for forty years, with the rhythm worn down to a coin. he meant the plastic of cards, mostly. he meant the way a card lets a person buy a thing they cannot, on a careful reading, afford. he meant his own father, who had a wallet full of bills and a face full of opinions about banks.

i did not, at the time, agree. i was nineteen. i thought the wallet of bills was a costume he wore for the family. i thought the card was the future, and the future was a clean idea, and clean ideas did not have personalities. i was, on the chart, somewhere around peak mount confidence with a part-time job. dan, i would now say, would have liked me a lot. dan would have nodded.

here is what i missed. the card is not the issue. the way a person carries the card is the issue. dad, who never had a black one, watched men use them at restaurants where he was the one paying. he watched them flick the card down on the leather folder the way a magician puts down a deck. he watched them pretend not to look while the waiter walked it away. he understood, before any of us, that the card was not a tool. it was a tell. you could read a man by the angle of his card the way another generation read men by the brand of their hat.

this is the part where, in another draft, i would footnote a study. i don’t have a study. i have my dad and a corner of memory and a fridge i opened at 2 am for no reason. that is the bibliography. give it to dan to review.

the 2 am revelation that sealed the take

at 2 am, last tuesday, i had what is, in this house, called a 2 am revelation, which is the polite term for “an idea i would not have had with a full night’s sleep.” the idea, fully formed, was that the credit card hierarchy was a complete personality typology. four cards, four men. visa is the older brother. amex is the friend who shows up late. mastercard is the cousin who lies about jobs. discover is the one no one mentions, who has, in fact, been at every family reunion and paid for the cake.

i wrote this on a post-it. the post-it is, this morning, on the standing desk where i sit, two inches to the left of the keyboard, surviving the second coffee. the handwriting is mine. it is also, on a careful reading, not entirely sober. but the take held. the take is, eight hours later, still a take. that is the diagnostic. the ones that survive sunlight are the ones that count.

here is where the dan kruger effect comes in, which is to say, here is where i should be most careful and will be least. i, the person typing this, am exactly the kind of person the chart was drawn to describe. i have a take. i am defending it at a desk on a wednesday. i have not read the paper. i have not done the math. i have, on the corner of this desk, a wip 2022 list with forty-six items on it, none of which are “research credit card sociology before posting.” the list has been open in the fourth tab since february, which is what i tell people when i mean february of last year.

chatgpt screens my emails and would, if asked, generate a polite alternative version of this post in which i did not commit. i am not asking. that’s the discipline. the discipline is, on a careful reading, the only thing separating me from dan.

i rest my case

three findings, since i started this draft, that i am willing to put my name to.

finding one. the dan kruger effect is not a separate effect. it is a typo of the dunning kruger effect, with the first author’s surname softened into a man named dan who is, in the speaker’s mind, a colleague who left the firm in good standing. there is no dan. there has never been a dan. give the man his name back. it is dunning. it is hard to say. that is fine.

finding two. credit cards are a personality trait. the take stands. the take, eight hours after a fridge opened for no reason, has not weakened. i am, at the desk, holding it. i am also aware, at the desk, that a person on the peak of the chart would be holding a take exactly like this one in exactly this way. the awareness does not save me. it does not save anyone. you’ll notice the people most worried about the chart are still on it. they are just standing on a different patch of grass.

finding three. the seventh microwave is on its way, ordered tuesday, due thursday. there is no link between this fact and the rest of the post. it is here because it is here. i’m fairly sure there’s a film tradition for men who keep getting new appliances and learning nothing — see the 2002 film “minority report” with tom cruise, which is about a man who knows he will be wrong and does the thing anyway. that is the credit card. that is also, possibly, dan.

the third yoga mat, on a separate piece of geography, is still under the couch from 2023, possibly evolving. i have not been on it. i have not been near it. it is, like dan, a man i know in name only.

before i close this tab — and the tab will, in the next ten minutes, become tab fourteen of forty-seven, and tab fourteen is, on the wip 2022 list, an item i can finally retire — let me point you sideways. for what an actual idiot, sent abroad, looks like when the chart applies in another country, see the longer piece on what an idiot abroad gets wrong, in particular at airports. the post is not about credit cards. it is about being abroad and being wrong with a passport in hand. the chart, in that case, is geographical. dan, abroad, would still be sure. dan would have a theory about the local tipping. dan would be loud at the airport bar.

carla just walked past the desk on the way to a coffee i am not going to ask about. screen swapped, casually. the training session, on the agenda, runs until the half-hour. the post-it is still on the desk. the wip 2022 list is still in the fourth tab.

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