duncan kruger effect, and i’m fairly sure

sarah was in line behind me at the supermarket and i, somehow, walked out with a yoga mat that was not on my list, was not on anyone’s list, and was, technically, the property of the woman in front of me. i was fairly sure of myself the whole time. that is the part i want to talk about.

this post is about the duncan kruger effect. yes, duncan. with an A. that is what i typed into a search bar last week with the calm certainty of a man who blames autocorrect for everything.

it is 11:34am on a friday. carla is upstairs running training for the new hires, the kind where name tags get printed and the coffee in the third floor kitchen is described as “fine”. i have until lunch.

duncan kruger effect: a misspelling of the dunning kruger effect, the cognitive bias where people who know very little about a topic believe they know quite a lot. there is no duncan. the typo is, in itself, a small live demonstration of the original phenomenon. you will recognize the irony in approximately one paragraph.

DUNCAN. IS. NOT. A. PSYCHOLOGIST.

duncan kruger is not a researcher, but he could be

the dunning-kruger effect was named after david dunning and justin kruger, two psychologists who in the late nineties published a paper i have seen referenced in approximately ninety thousand twitter threads and read, in its entirety, zero times. (i opened the pdf once. i read the abstract. i closed the tab.)

“duncan” is a person i invented while typing too fast. between the search bar and the third paragraph, i had built a partial biography. duncan was the less famous brother of dunning’s collaborator. ohio, possibly indiana. never got credit. now sells real estate. duncan deserves better.

none of it is true. but i was prepared to defend him for several minutes before i noticed the squiggly red line under my typing. that is the duncan kruger effect in its purest form: a man so confident in his typo he begins constructing a personality for it.

sarah at the supermarket, behind a yoga mat

i was at the supermarket on a saturday under duress — my mother had asked the previous sunday if i had eaten a vegetable that week, and i had said cucumber, and she had said cucumbers are technically water. the seed was planted.

sarah was behind me in line. sarah, who runs marathons. sarah, who has the kind of pension a person can describe at parties without apologizing afterward. sarah, who is not, has never been, and will not become my boss.

sarah said: “are you buying that yoga mat.” i looked at my cart. there was, indeed, a yoga mat in it. this is the third yoga mat i have brought toward my apartment; the previous two are under the couch from 2023, possibly evolving. i had not put this one in the cart. i was fairly sure. i was also fairly sure of the duncan kruger effect, so my fairly-sure track record is not what we should rely on.

sarah pointed. the woman in front of me had the look of someone who had set down a yoga mat, turned to her phone, and come back to find a man behind her loading her merchandise into his cart with the certainty of a man drafting a short biography of duncan. i gave it back. the woman thanked me. sarah said nothing for a long second, which is a sarah specialty.

what was in the cart, none of which was milk

here is the inventory:

• a tin of olives i do not eat
• seltzer in a flavor the can called “atmosphere”
• a magazine about boats, in finnish
• a candle that smelled like a hotel lobby
• three different mustards
• the aforementioned yoga mat (not mine)
• no milk

milk was the entire reason for the trip. milk was the cucumber-water continuation plan. milk was the one item i had written on the back of an envelope from the unopened pile. the envelope had a window suggesting i should open it. i did not. i used it as a list.

walking home without milk, holding the candle, i had a thought: i need to write about duncan kruger. the typo was the symptom; the cart was the diagnosis. a man who walks in for milk and walks out with another woman’s yoga mat should not, the same afternoon, be lecturing the internet on a bias he cannot spell.

the actual effect, briefly

the dunning-kruger effect, real spelling, refers to the gap between how good people think they are at a thing and how good they actually are. the bottom overrates. the top underrates. you can read the careful version in define dunning-kruger effect, which i wrote a few weeks ago, interrupted twice by carla, who senses earnestness and finds it suspicious.

there is a graph. it has a peak called mount stupid, which is the best name a graph has ever had. i covered the shape in the dunning kruger graph. the duncan kruger effect, the typo version, is the same shape, with a man’s name attached that does not belong to anyone.

the savings account problem, briefly, before the seventh microwave

sarah has a 401k-equivalent she contributes to every month with the discipline of a person who has read at least one book about it. a savings account, i continue to insist, is a hobby for the financially serene. i think i know enough to manage. i do not know enough to manage. the gap between those two sentences is where my pension is supposed to be living. it is, at best, in a candle.

the seventh microwave is on order. the sixth is in the kitchen, technically functional. the seventh is a contingency, in the same way a man who is “fairly sure” of the duncan kruger effect calls his confidence a contingency. it isn’t. it’s a typo.

findings — the typo opens a door

after duncan, after the cart, after sarah, here is what i would offer before lunch:

one. the duncan kruger effect, as a typo, is itself a textbook case of the dunning kruger effect: the man typing it does not realize what he has done. the bias is recursive.

two. i can build a partial biography for a fictional ohio researcher in the time it takes to open a second tab. i have 47 tabs open, three of which are about duncan-the-person.

three. if you have ever typed a name, googled it, and proceeded as if partial results confirmed you — congratulations, you have met duncan. duncan lives in everyone’s spell-checker.

i looked into this through the lens of the dunning kruger effect test, the one i made on my kitchen table. the test did not produce useful data, because the only person who took it was me, and i scored, by my own grading, in the top three percent. that, again, is the bias in real time.

i refilled the coffee. carla emailed the floor about a “small admin matter” the new hires will sit through with the frozen look you only see in training rooms.

the door from the duncan kruger effect leads, frankly, to the very large room of being stupid, where i have visited many times and keep a folding chair near the window. duncan is welcome to join me. he won’t. he doesn’t exist. but the chair is there.

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