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There are some things that most of us will almost instinctively call stupid, even if they are done by someone we don’t think is stupid at all. Why?
Hungarian researcher Balazs Aczel of the Lorand Eötvös University in Budapest and his colleagues set out to find out which psychological features of certain actions cause such an automatic reaction. To begin with, scientists have collected a collection of real-life examples of “stupid” behavior. As sources, news from the sites of The New York Times, BBC and others were used. In addition, they asked 26 students to keep diaries for five days, in which they had to write down all the examples of stupid actions that they happened to observe. In total, the authors collected 180 stories with examples of stupid behavior.
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Brief descriptions of the events in these stories (some of which were deliberately changed by the researchers) were given to 154 Hungarian students to read, who were then asked to rate how stupid they considered the behavior of the hero of each story. Students also had to guess what psychological factors could explain such behavior (for example, overconfidence, fatigue).
The researchers were surprised by the unanimity of the students – about 90% of them equally assessed whether to consider certain behavior stupid or not. The assessment of the degree of stupidity of an act primarily depended on its consequences and on how much responsibility the person who committed it was endowed with. The authors believe that it is for this reason that we especially strongly criticize experts and leaders for their mistakes.
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Most often, participants in the study considered stupid things done because of ignorance, absent-mindedness, or loss of control over themselves.
Ignorance was primarily understood as the commission of various risky acts without the necessary skills and knowledge for this. For example, in one case, a group of thieves stole devices they thought were mobile phones. They were actually GPS trackers that helped the police find them.
Losing control of oneself meant some kind of addiction like alcoholism or drug addiction, or simply an excessive passion for something to the detriment of everything else. For example, people could miss a meeting with friends, being unable to tear themselves away from a computer game.
“These results show that different people are surprisingly unanimous in their ideas about what actions are stupid. Stupidity is generally thought to be associated with low IQ, but we have found that three other factors (ignorance, absent-mindedness, and loss of self-control) play a major role here. In the future, we want to explore the extent to which observing the stupid actions of others helps us learn from the mistakes of others,” says Balazs Axel.
Подробнее см. B. Aczel et al. «What is stupid?», Intelligence, vol. 53, November–December 2015.