One of Last Century’s Most Influential Social Science Studies Is Pretty Bad
We love putting names to things, especially if those names are scientific. Just look at the variety of phenomena people love to refer to as the Dunning-Kruger effect: the idea that other people (not me!) overestimate what they know, the sighting of someone being aggressively wrong, or simply the belief that dumb people don’t know they are dumb. The fact that science has studied a phenomenon and plastered a name over it feels good. But sometimes, when we dig into the origin of these scientific stories, we discover they have been heavily distorted in the telling.