kruger effect meaning, explained in 5 sips at a bar stool

the corner bar has one bulb that flickers and one stool that tilts and one man, me, explaining a famous psychology effect to a bartender who did not ask. the quarterly review was happening somewhere uptown. i had opinions about that too. i had opinions about everything. the credit cards in my wallet had personalities and so did i.

that was monday night. it is now monday again, one week later, 11:34am, desk, screen tilted away from the door. the vendor walkthrough swallowed the floor at eleven. i have notes from the bar. some are legible.

the phrase i want to handle, with the gentleness it does not deserve, is the kruger effect meaning. it is a phrase a man uses, late, after the second beer, when he wants to call a colleague confidently wrong without doing the work of saying so. i used it monday. mike was two stools down. mike, on tax matters, has not filed a return since 2019, and was therefore — for once — the moral authority of the room.

kruger effect meaning: the second half of the famous psychology phrase, used as conversational shorthand for a wider pattern. it points to the gap between what a person thinks they know and what they actually know, where the loud talker on the topic is statistically the wrong one to follow. people deploy it almost always about somebody else, almost never about themselves, and almost always over a beer that someone else is paying for.

CONFIDENCE. PAYS. THE. BAR. TAB.

that goes on the wall. there is a film for the bar version of this whole problem — see the 2003 film “lost in translation”, in which bill murray, in a country whose language he does not speak, is repeatedly the wisest man in the room without saying anything at all. i, on a stool that tilts, was performing the opposite act. i was the loud man. i was, in that moment, neither murray nor the language.

kruger effect meaning, the bar version i delivered on monday

here is what i told the bartender, between the third sip and the fourth. the phrase, i said, mostly meant the gap: the space between confidence and competence, where the confident person talks and the competent person listens. i said it with my hands. mike, two stools down, did not interrupt. mike has the patient face of a man who has heard several theories about why other people are wrong.

the bartender said: “so it’s about you.” i said: “no, it’s about other people.” mike laughed for a moment without looking up. for a wider picture of the pattern — not just the bar phrase — see the longer walkthrough of the dunning-kruger effect i drafted last month, which has an actual chart and fewer beers in it.

the credit cards in my wallet, all four of them, judged me silently while i talked. credit cards are a personality trait. i defend that take in private and in public. it is, by the strict reading of the phrase i was busy explaining, the exact kind of confident wrongness the phrase describes. you cannot escape the meaning while explaining it. that is the recursion. that is, frankly, the joke.

what the phrase, technically, covers

technically, the phrase covers the second half of a longer pattern first observed in the late nineties by two researchers whose names i’d rather not get wrong here. for a more careful unpacking, see the definition i drafted earlier on a wednesday, which uses a chart and a coaster and does not mention a bartender. the second half gets quoted because it’s shorter. things that are shorter get quoted. accuracy is secondary to portability.

in its bar life, the phrase does three things. one: describes a person with too much confidence. two: describes a person with too little. three: describes the speaker’s slight smug satisfaction at having identified either of the first two. nobody admits the third one. the third one is ninety percent of the phrase’s traffic. the rest is linkedin posts about a former colleague.

i looked it up in three places. one had a paywall. one had a broken image where the chart should have been. one was a podcast i listened to for nine minutes while pretending to fold laundry, which, by minute nine, was unchanged. that, in its own way, is the meaning.

how mike, two stools down, improved the definition

mike’s version, after my fourth sip, was shorter than mine. mike said: “everyone has it.” i said: “no, the phrase only describes other people.” mike said: “that’s the part you have.” mike then ordered another beer. mike did more work in seven words than i had done in nine minutes of monologue.

mike’s definition, condensed: the phrase is a polite way of calling somebody confidently wrong while reserving the right not to be one yourself. the loophole is the purpose. you say it about someone else, you do not get a polygraph, and you walk home feeling slightly taller. it is a weapon that does not, by tradition, recoil.

i nodded at mike. mike did not nod back. mike does not nod. mike, in his way, is the closest thing the corner bar has to a research subject — a man who has watched the bar’s loud talkers for six years and has never once explained a thing back. mike is, by my accounting, on the long climb. mike calls it “monday”.

examples i have collected, all of them other people, obviously

i’ll give you three. the names are softened so that nobody, on a budget i don’t have, can sue me.

example one. the man two seats down from mike, last monday, explained to a stranger, for nineteen straight minutes, how mortgages work. he does not own a home. he rents. the stranger paid for one of his beers. confidence is a small loan with no collateral.

example two. a colleague — not carla, another one, in another department — told me at the elevator, with a serious face, that project management was a “vibe”. this person has never managed a project. they were, in that moment, on the famous cliff with a clean lanyard.

example three. productivity bro on the internet, posting threads that begin “ten things i wish i had known at twenty-five”. he is twenty-six. he has known these things, generously, for eleven months. the thread has eleven thousand likes. the system, in this respect, is the meaning’s biggest fan.

none of these people are me. obviously. an idiot can recognize a fellow idiot, on a good day, and i recognize these three. i am, on a careful reading, a slightly self-aware idiot of the desk-and-bar variety, but the phrase, in my private accounting, applies to other people on weekdays and to me only at 2 am, briefly, in pencil.

three signs the phrase is, currently, about you

i wrote these on the back of a coaster. the coaster is in my coat pocket. the coat is on a hook — the hook being, possibly, the most reliable piece of furniture in my apartment. more reliable, certainly, than the third yoga mat evolving under the couch.

1. you used the phrase about somebody else this week. almost certainly. that is the public life of the phrase. nine times out of ten, that is where it lives, and the someone-else is usually a colleague who once corrected your pronunciation in a meeting.
2. you used the phrase about yourself this week, briefly, at 2 am, and then took it back by 7 am. that is the private life of the phrase. brief, sincere, retracted. the retraction is the tell. the retraction always involves coffee.
3. you skipped a meeting and said it was because you do your best work elsewhere. i’ll be the judge of what’s relevant in my own post. this one is.

three for three is, frankly, normal. nobody scores zero. the goal isn’t zero. the goal is to, occasionally, notice. that’s it. that’s the entire useful application of the phrase. for the version of all this that hits at 2 am in front of a fridge, the earlier essay on what the meaning looks like at 2 am covers more ground than i’m willing to cover before lunch.

chatgpt, which screens my email and increasingly screens my own takes, told me, when i pasted the monologue in, that the argument “held up”. the machine was the wrong audience. the machine has no stool to tilt on. the machine, like me, is exempt from the phrase by its own design. that is, possibly, the second-most disturbing thing i learned this week.

the wip 2022 list, tab three, is open as i type. forty-six items, none moved since february of that year. it is the kind of list a man with the phrase in question would, in a healthier life, have closed. i have not. that, if anything, is the only argument i have in my own defense.

the seventh microwave is on the counter at home, since thursday. seventh because the previous six are on the napkin dave keeps in his glove compartment. dave does not, mercifully, know about the bar monologue. that is one of the small protections monday-night privacy still affords a man with credit cards and opinions.

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