I suppose that the Dunning Kruger effect is "well studied" in that there have been many attempts to study it, which so far cannot find reproducible results, and suggest that it isn't a real psychological phenomenon.
Look, I understand there's a lot of trouble in psychology in general and there has been some reproduction issues with that one. But the truth is, we all know instances of the guy who thinks he knows everything just because he's good at something else and just thinks everything people went through to get where they are was a mistake. Whether or not this is a psychological thing in reality, it's something most of us have experienced and that's the name people know it by.
That's not even what the original study claimed to find though! It caught on because it seems so intuitive, yes, but the specific curve of confidence vs. skill doesn't seem to look like that at all.
This is how memes or memetics or just language works though. Things often get called something they aren't and if it sticks it sticks. I'm not saying it's correct or whatever, just that it stuck because it vaguely gave a name for something people experience and didn't have a name for before.
Look through any etymological dictionary and you'll see this phenomenon. What does a computer have to do with "to strike" in PIE? Something! But it's not the literal meaning.
No, but the behavior expressed by adopting such an attitude is. Yours is a nitpick that is probably worth mentioning but doesn't really change the analysis.
Again, I'm not saying that's what it SHOULD be called, I'm saying it's a useful term for something we experience. At some point the wrong definition becomes the correct one, that's most etymologies.
It's why people say "and I" as an object and don't know what question begging is or whatever. It just doesn't matter in the long run.
Those studies, which do consistently show significant effects despite your citation-unladen claim, explore averages across a general population and seek to explain society-wide phenomena through the lens of "average" humans. This implies an assumption of homogeneity within the general population. Such tests will of course be underpowered compared to case studies in specific circumstances, particularly those involving self-selection and a cohort-level cultural bias toward "I'm smart and need to pick things up quickly for my day job which means that skill is equally accurate and transferrable to everything I read about".
It started as a syndrome. I don't think it would survive Wikipedia's modern standards if it hadn't generated its own support by existing in a different era.
