About Kruger-Dunning Syndrome

All over the internet^[1], people are talking about Dunning-Kruger syndrome. That is wrong. It should be called the Kruger-Dunning syndrome^[2]. In the article [KD1999] in which the phenomenon is first described, Justin Kruger is the first author and David Dunning the second. Furthermore, in a followup article [EJBDK2008] in which the ætiology of the syndrome was verified, reference is made several times to “Kruger and Dunning”, not “Dunning and Kruger”, and the exact phrase “Kruger and Dunning pattern” is used. Yet for some reason, nobody on the internet^[3] is calling it Kruger-Dunning.

It should be called the Kruger-Dunning syndrome.

I don't know why people aren't calling it Kruger-Dunning. It may have something to do with the entry in the list of IgNoble Prize winners, “David Dunning of Cornell University and Justin Kruger of the University of Illinois, for their modest report…”, which for some reason mentions Dunning before Kruger. (It's not because of alphabetical order, as a quick scan of other winners reveals.)

It should be called the Kruger-Dunning syndrome.

Now that I've clarified that, there's another point which deserves mention. Much has been made of the Kruger-Dunning syndrome and its consequences; however, it was not until I read the original article [KD1999] that I noticed that not only did they describe the syndrome and ætiology, they also described a (partial) cure: education. More precisely, educating the experimental subjects^[4], whether the education was effective or not, enabled them to better assess their competence; to quote the abstract, “improving the skills of the participants… helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.”

Did I mention education?

Thanks for listening. Now go out and spread the word!

Notes
1. ^The examples listed are not in any way reflective of the quality of, or my opinion of, the contents; they simply reflect pages which showed up during a google search.
2. ^It is, in my opinion, debatable as to whether it should be called a “syndrome”, as opposed to, e.g., “phenomenon” or “pattern” as is done in [EJBDK2008].
3. ^The phrase “nobody on the internet” should, of course, be interpreted as “I didn't find anything with a lazy google search.”
4. ^That's “people”, in case you were wondering.

Bibliography
• [EJBDK2008] Joyce Ehrlinger, Kerri Johnson, Matthew Banner, David Dunning, and Justin Kruger, “Why the unskilled are unaware: Further explorations of (absent) self-insight among the incompetent”, Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 105 (2008) 98-121.
• [KD1999] Justin Kruger and David Dunning, “Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1999, Vol. 77, No. 6, 1121-1134.