ABSTRACT
Stupidity is practiced more than it is studied. It is probably a human cultural universal though not celebrated as such. The economic historian Carlo Cipolla sketched a framework for locating stupidity in the universe of human behavior using a 2 × 2 graph (Pomeroy, 2016). The x-axis extends continuously from “harmful to self” to “helpful to self” and the y-axis from “harmful to others” to “helpful to others.” Those who are helpful to self but harmful to others are, of course, bandits; those who are both self- and other-harmful are, according to this scheme, stupid. Stupidity is the B side of intelligence, and it is not unexpected that a highly credentialed generalist in the intelligence field assembled a comprehensive set of academic essays on the subject (Sternberg, 2003), examining the foibles of managers, politicians, and other foolish creatures. Stupidity also twines around the roots of humor, a rich vein of cross-cultural interplay (Yue, Jiang, Lu, & Hiranandani, 2016).
