How To Handle Stupid People

In 1976, an Italian economic historian named Carlo Cipolla wrote a short essay called The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. He meant it partly as a joke, and it has been passed around for decades. But underneath humor is one of the most useful definitions I’ve ever seen. Cipolla didn’t measure stupidity by intelligence, education, or vocabulary.

He measured it by outcomes.                                             

In his framework, every action answer two questions. Does it help or hurt the person doing it? Does it help or hurt the people around them?

The answers sort human behavior into four categories.

Image by the author, adapted from Carlo M. Cipolla’s Basic Laws of Human Stupidity.

Intelligent people gain something and leave others better off. Helpless people lose while others gain, often because someone took advantage of them. Bandits gain at someone else’s expense, and they’re the quadrant most of police work is built around. Stupid people lose, and so does everyone near them.

Cipolla’s boldest claim was that stupid people are more dangerous than bandits. That sounded backward to me at first, since bandits are the ones, we arrest. But a bandit wants something, and wanting something makes a person rational in a narrow way. You can deter him, bargain with him, or wait for him to decide the risk isn’t worth it.

None of that works on someone who gains nothing from the damage.

By Cipolla’s standard, a man who says “high anus” when he means “hiatus” barely registers on the chart. He lost a little dignity, and nobody else lost anything. The only real casualty was the English language.

We save the word stupid for the person who can’t find the right word, when it belongs to the person who keeps causing damage with no reason behind it.

I find Cipolla’s second law a bit uncomfortable but absolutely true: the odds that someone is stupid have nothing to do with any other trait, including education or intelligence.

You can’t spot them by their vocabulary, their job, or their education.

You spot them by what they leave behind.

Motive is how you find a suspect, maybe predict his next move, and figure out what he’ll trade to make a problem go away.

With a bandit, that question always leads somewhere. With a stupid person, it leads nowhere, and eventually I learned to stop asking.

That habit is worth stealing.

When someone in your life causes damage, ask what they got out of it. If you can find the gain, you’re dealing with a bandit, and you can work with bandits because they respond to consequences, incentives, and the risk of getting caught.

If you look hard and find nothing, stop searching for a reason that isn’t there. You can waste years trying to understand behavior that isn’t meant to be understood. Bad behavior without motive is a warning sign.

The second sign is repetition.

Stupid people don’t just have one bad day. No, they have the same bad day on a loop, with different people getting hurt each time.

Think of the coworker who sinks every project he or she touches, or the relative who turns every holiday into a drama-filled crisis, or the business partner who keeps making the choice that hurts you both.

Each looks like bad luck until you step back and see the bigger picture.

A pattern with no payoff is not bad luck.

Cipolla’s fourth law explains why decent people still get hurt. He wrote that non-stupid people consistently underestimate the damage stupid people can do.

We extend good faith, explain ourselves one more time, and assume the other person wants the same reasonable outcome as we do. That assumption makes us vulnerable.

You can’t negotiate with someone who has nothing to gain.

All you can really do is create distance.

Don’t co-sign a loan, don’t partner with them, don’t hand over the keys, and don’t spend years trying to reason someone out of a pattern they can’t see or don’t care to see.

Being kind doesn’t mean sticking around to be victimized.