don kruger effect, and i’m fairly sure

mike was holding court last friday, a beer in front of him and an entire psychology effect rolling out of him, while uptown someone i used to share a cubicle with was running a quarterly review. one cupholder per car would solve civilization. i decided this between sips. i am fairly sure of it still.

mike said the words, slowly, the way a man says the name of a saint he has invented. “the don kruger effect,” he said. he held the syllables up like a coin he had found on the floor of a parking garage. he was not joking. he was not pretending. mike, who has not filed a tax return in roughly six years, had absorbed the term the way most of us absorb terms — through the air, sideways, across the bar — and his brain, doing the work it does best, had handed him the version with the most personality on the consonants. don. not dunning. don.

here is the thing about the don kruger effect: it is not a real spelling. there is no don. there has never been a don. the man’s name was kruger, the other man’s name was dunning, and somewhere between a podcast mike half-listened to in a cab and a friday at the corner bar, “dunning” lost its second half and gained a hat and a ring kissed at a wedding. for the longer, properly-named version of the chart and the people on it, see the pillar piece on the dunning kruger effect, drafted at this same desk on a different morning. that one has the chart. this one has mike.

writing this from the desk. carla is in the q3 review on the third floor and won’t be back until lunch, weather permitting. the standing desk, where i sit, has held this draft and a coffee for forty-five of those minutes.

don is not the man’s name, almost certainly

the original 1999 study was run by david dunning and justin kruger. two researchers. one paper. no italian heritage on the title page. and yet — and this is the small miracle of the language — the moment a term enters the bar, the consonants start to move. dunning is a long word for a man with a beer in his hand. it has an “ing” at the end, which costs effort. don is one syllable. don implies things. don is the name of a man who runs a small operation out of a back room and orders the calzone without looking at the menu.

mike, who is not stupid — i want this on record — has done what every brain does with new information at the corner of a bar. he has trimmed it. he has rounded it. he has sanded the edges off the long german surname and left, in his hand, a syllable that fits the conversation. it is not a citation. it is, in linguistic terms, a courtesy to the listener. “don kruger,” he said, and the bar nodded, because the bar knew exactly what he meant.

i am, if we are being honest, an active participant in this kind of erosion. i have, on at least two voicemails, said “kruger effect” and meant the longer version. i did not feel guilty about it. i felt efficient. that, also, is the chart.

how this came up at the corner bar

mike’s beer was the second of the evening. mine was the second of the evening. these facts are unrelated to the quality of the analysis, although a man with a fourth beer would have been on firmer rhetorical ground. mike said the term in the middle of a longer monologue about cars. he believes, as a matter of policy, that cars should have one cupholder, six is greed. he has held this take for the duration of our friendship. he holds it the way a priest holds a wafer.

the don kruger effect, in his telling, was the reason every man at the bar two stools down believed he could rebuild a transmission with a flashlight and a youtube tab. mike said this with the warmth of a man who has, on three separate occasions, been the man two stools down. mike does not exempt himself. that’s why mike is, on the chart, somewhere honorable. not high. but honorable.

there is, somewhere in cinema, a complete dramatization of this exact phenomenon. the 1972 film “the godfather” is built around men who absorb an entire moral framework through dialogue at long tables, and then act on that framework with the confidence of men who have read very little and listened a lot. the bar, on a friday, is the long table. mike is the listener. don kruger is what the long table produces, given enough hours and enough beer. that is, i am fairly sure, the missing scene from the screenplay.

the don kruger effect, in plain english, briefly

the actual effect, stripped of italian, is what happens when a person who knows little about a thing is also, by the design of the situation, the one most willing to volunteer first. you don’t have enough information to be careful, so you go. people who know more sit on their hands, because they remember the last time they were sure and were wrong. the project, two months later, is two months behind. the project meeting included someone who said “easy, three steps,” and someone who said “it depends,” and the room picked the wrong voice. it almost always picks the wrong voice.

this is also, regrettably, why every confident liar at a dinner party gets a clean run at the table while the careful person sits quietly with the bread. the loudest, least-informed answer wins on tone. the most honest answer loses on tone. tone, in groups, is the only currency. for a longer treatment of the underlying species — the kind of person who builds a personality out of being wrong on purpose — see the piece on the working definition of a liar, drafted from this same desk on a tuesday i’d rather not return to.

DON. IS. NOT. A. CITATION. STILL.

why nicknames diminish the researchers

here’s the part that makes me, briefly, feel sorry for david dunning, whom i have never met. when the internet shortens his name to don, it does two small violences at once. it removes him from the work — there is no david in don kruger — and it gives the work the flavor of a wrong man. the effect is real. it has been replicated. it shows up in meetings, on highways, at every bar that serves more than one beer. and yet, in the popular telling, one of its authors has been replaced by a vague italian uncle. that is, on its face, a small unfairness.

i’d like to say, in print, that the term is the dunning kruger effect. two surnames. neither italian. one paper, one chart, one finding that has, on a careful reading, never failed to describe a meeting i sat in. for the typo cousins of this term — and there is a small bureau of them in my browser tabs, which now total forty-seven — see the dunder kruger version, drafted at this same desk on a different jam. that one is named after a fictional paper company. this one is named after a fictional uncle. they are, in a real sense, the same office.

chatgpt, which screens my emails the way a doorman screens guests at a club he is not paid enough to defend, regularly produces both spellings in the same paragraph. it does not flinch. it does not flag the typo. the machine, in its infinite politeness, treats don and dunning as roommates. that is, also, the chart. the machine is on the peak. it has slippers.

findings, give the man his name

three findings, in order, drafted between carla’s first and second appearance on the third floor.

finding one. the don kruger effect is not a separate effect. it is the dunning kruger effect, with the first author’s surname replaced by a syllable that suggests a back room and a kissed ring. there is no don. there has never been a don. the man’s name is dunning. give the man his name.

finding two. mike, on a careful reading of his bar performance, is somewhere in the honest middle of the chart — not because he knows the citation, but because he has, on at least four occasions, said “i don’t know” out loud, in front of strangers, at the bar. that is the only diagnostic that has ever held. it is harder than it sounds. dave, who is a different person and a different problem, has never managed it.

finding three. the wip 2022 list, in the third tab from the left, has on it an item that says, in my own handwriting transferred to a digital note, “find out who don kruger is.” today i can, finally, close that item. the item has been there for nineteen months. closing it is, on the chart, the climb back. the climb back never quite reaches the early peak. that is fine. the early peak had a fork in it, and the climb back has lunch.

i did, by the way, kill the seventh microwave last week. you cannot, it turns out, microwave a fork. i suspected the rule. i tested the rule. the rule held. the new one is coming on thursday. the third yoga mat, on a separate piece of geography, is still under the couch from 2023, possibly evolving. neither of these facts is a finding. they are, on the chart, the climate.

carla just walked past the desk and did not stop. screen swapped, casually. the q3 review must have broken for coffee. the don kruger tab is still open, in tab nine, between two recipes i will not make and a payroll form from a job i left in 2022.

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