In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity.
Stupid people, Carlo M. Cipolla explained, share several identifying traits: they are abundant, they are irrational, and they cause problems for others without apparent benefit to themselves, thereby lowering society’s total well-being. There are no defenses against stupidity, argued the Italian-born professor, who died in 2000. The only way a society can avoid being crushed by the burden of its idiots is if the non-stupid work even harder to offset the losses of their stupid brethren.
More here – Pocket Worthy
I am fascinated by social and group psychology but I am truly disappointed about the poor state of pure research in this area. There is much theorising and speculation. And it underpins weird crowd phenomena such as the manias we know about in trading (Tulips, Louisiana, etc).
Other than by intuition, it seems to me that we have no understanding at all of what constitutes stupidity, or even defines it, really.
But I am fascinated that our greatest capacity for stupid behaviour is in crowds. And aberrant crowd behaviour defines the USA at present, with the capacity to affect the whole world subsequently. And many other areas of the world are not too far behind. We are very good at describing stupidity, but our understanding is extremely poor. It seems to me that deeply researching crowd behaviour has never been more important. And we must get far away from theories and speculation and do some real research. It has never been more important.