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Its authors never named the effect
What the effect claims
The popular version of the effect is that people at the bottom don't know they're at the bottom, period. The authors count something more: the mechanism that connects performing badly to not noticing it.
The name as an insult
Then the name turned into a weapon. On Twitter, people were yelling, You Dunning-Kruger idiot, at each other. David Dunning's biggest regret is that the term became an epithet to hurl at other people, when the paper was offered as a reason to self-reflect.
A claim about everyone
Dunning-Kruger is not about being stupid. It is about everybody: each of us has pockets of incompetence, some with more spectacular stories than others. The point is to be careful and wise, and to set yourself up for success as a person who grows and changes.
How did the paper first reach a wide audience?
Dunning and Kruger's paper appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1999. In 2000 they received the Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology for it, an award from the magazine Annals of Improbable Research for studies that first make people laugh and then make them think. The Ig Nobel ceremony is held at Harvard University.
Where does the Mount Stupid graph come from?
A popular chart shows confidence soaring early, crashing, and then slowly rising, often labeled Mount Stupid. That curve does not appear in the 1999 paper. The paper's figures plot perceived ability and actual ability by quartile, with the lowest quartile's self-estimates far above their scores. The chart circulated online as an illustration of the idea.
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