kruger effect, an explainer, sort of

stefan reappeared, like a fridge magnet you forgot you bought, with a glass of wine in one hand and a famous psychology effect in the other. pineapple on pizza, he announced, is an acceptable topping, while we are at it. the 47 tabs, in my browser, were the digital equivalent of a fridge stuck closed by its own magnets.

he had wandered up the hallway in slippers, because stefan owns slippers for the office, and he had, in his other hand, a printout of something he had not, on closer inspection, read. the printout said “kruger effect” across the top. just kruger. no dunning. like one of those bands that lost a member in a quiet way and kept the name short.

stefan does not know who kruger is. that, as it happens, is the post.

desk on a tuesday. carla is upstairs in a training session about a tool nobody asked for. ninety minutes, no surveillance, one open tab named “kruger”.

here is the thing. the kruger effect, as a standalone concept, is not really a thing. it is the dunning-kruger effect after one of the names has fallen off the back of a moving truck. the version with both names i have already covered, in slightly more detail and with the same cast, in the long pillar i drafted at this same desk on a different morning. that one has the chart. that one has the horizon. this one is the orphan.

the kruger effect without dunning, the orphan version

strip the dunning out of the term and what remains is mostly a confidence problem with one author’s name attached. you can tell, on a careful reading of the search results, that people typing “kruger effect” mean the same effect — the one where the people least equipped to do a thing feel the most certain about doing it — they have just dropped half of the citation. it is, on the chart, a peak move. you are confident enough about the term to say it short. it would also, in a more honest world, be the first answer in any quiz about the effect itself.

i am not blameless. i have, in conversation with stefan and in two emails to my mother, said “kruger effect” and meant the longer one. the longer one is hard to say at speed. the shorter one slides off the tongue like a mildly informed opinion, which, on a tuesday, is what i am peddling.

justin kruger and david dunning ran the original 1999 finding together. removing one of them from the title doesn’t remove him from the work. the work is still both of theirs. but the internet, which is run by length and search volume, has chopped one half off and reshelved the other. that is, by a wide margin, the most internet thing the internet has done this week.

stefan, the wine man, weighed in by accident

stefan, who has been formally introduced in an earlier post that walks through how this effect defines itself as the patron saint of the wine he has never grown, did the thing where he held the printout up at arm’s length and said “ah, kruger.” he said it with the inflection a man uses for a colleague he has not seen since 2017.

“who is kruger,” i asked, because the question, in stefan’s company, is part of the entertainment.

“a psychologist,” stefan said, with confidence. he was, in this case, technically correct. it was the first time stefan had been technically correct about a name in roughly four months. the wine, in his other hand, sloshed in approval.

i did not press. pressing stefan, when he is technically correct, is bad form — like waking a man on the only hour he has slept all month. instead i asked whether, in his experience, “kruger effect” and “dunning-kruger effect” meant the same thing. he said yes. he said it the way a man says “yes” when he has not heard the second half of the question. that, also, is the effect.

the digital fridge of ideas i keep

my browser, at this exact moment, has 47 tabs open. i counted. the tabs are arranged in roughly the order i opened them, which is not the order i will close them, because i will not close them. they sit there like leftovers. this is what i call, in private and now in public, the digital fridge — a place where ideas i meant to read live until they go bad, except that, unlike a fridge, the tabs do not go bad. they remain, indefinitely, at the temperature of intention.

tab 11 is the wikipedia page on the dunning-kruger effect, which i did not click and will not link, because this newsletter does not cite wikipedia. tab 12 is a thinkpiece i opened in march. tab 13 is a paywalled article i started and forgot. tab 14 is the wip 2022 list, which has forty-six items and has not moved since february of that year. it is open the way a chair is open. i sit at the standing desk where i sit. nothing moves.

the digital fridge is not a metaphor i am proud of. it is the truest one i have. you can see, in detail, the geometry of the kruger graph i once tried to walk through on a different morning — the spike, the dip, the slow climb — and you can see that the fridge, as a system, is the dip in physical form. the spike was when i opened the tabs. the dip is now. the slow climb would be closing them. the slow climb is not on the agenda this quarter.

KRUGER. WITHOUT. DUNNING. IS. HALF. A. JOKE.

why the shorter name persists online

the shorter name persists for the same reason most things on the internet persist: it fits in a search bar without ceremony. people typing “kruger effect” into a search bar are not making a citation. they are reaching for a word they half-remember. they get the right page anyway, because google, which has its own dunning-kruger problem, has decided, on their behalf, what they meant. that is the whole machine. it works most of the time. it is also why every other person at the bar can quote a study without naming the authors and feel, briefly, like a man who reads.

i looked at three pages on this. they all said roughly the same thing. they all had a chart. one of them, in passing, called the abbreviation “the lay term”, which is generous; “the lazy term” is closer. i’m fairly sure there is a study somewhere on how the internet shortens names by attrition, possibly in a magazine i don’t subscribe to. if there is, it is in the digital fridge, in tab 31, beneath two recipes i didn’t make.

there is, for what it’s worth, a film tradition for this exact dynamic — see the 1996 film “the cable guy” with jim carrey, where a man who has watched too much television confidently rebrands himself with the wrong half of a famous name and runs at the world like he invented it. that is, dramatically speaking, the kruger effect on its own. the dunning has fallen off. the man, in slippers, is still selling the act.

findings, stefan is partial

my findings, after ninety minutes that were, on a careful reading, not technically mine to spend, are these. the kruger effect, as a search term, exists. the kruger effect, as a concept, does not — not without dunning, not really, not in any way that holds up to a serious question from a man with a glass of red. it is the half-quote of a real finding, kept alive by the people most likely to be its subject, which is, in its own way, almost beautiful.

people who feel stupid after reading about the effect are, in my unscientific reading, on the climb back from the dip — and they tend to be the same people who, if you handed them a printout titled “kruger effect”, would say “wait, isn’t there another guy”, which is a question stefan has never asked in his life. the gap between those two postures is the only useful diagnostic in this whole mess. the people on the peak don’t ask. the people on the climb do. for a longer treatment of the climb itself, drafted by a man who has not finished it, see the piece on stupid as a working condition, written, again, from this same desk.

carla just walked past my desk. she did not stop. the training session must have broken for coffee. screen swapped. tab 11 is now tab 1, which is meaningless, but feels like progress.

the kruger effect, in the end, is what you get when an internet-shaped erosion takes a complete idea and rounds it down to fit a search bar. the effect itself, as a concept, is honest enough. the abbreviation is the joke. the joke is on the people typing it, including, on this tuesday, me. the printout, somewhere in the office, is now in stefan’s slipper.

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