Person Asks "What Is So Stupid But It Actually Really Works?" And 30 People Deliver

NecessaryPrudence told Bored Panda that they have had quite a few random conversations with friends and family that sometimes produced silly but somewhat interesting thoughts and questions, and it was what inspired this post, too.

"It's not something I intentionally came up with," NecessaryPrudence said. "Not even a serious conversation, but rather just chitchat."

The original poster has done things they would consider "really stupid" that actually worked out well. It made NecessaryPrudence relate to a lot of the answers, they said.

Reading the replies, they also realized that people have varying perceptions of what "stupid" is. "Is it really that stupid if it actually works? Maybe they see things as stupid because they don't see themselves doing these things until they find themselves actually doing it and get favorable results. The thought after the 'stupid' deed is what's funny," NecessaryPrudence summarized the post.

But what really defines an act as "stupid"? To find the answer to this question, Balazs Aczel and Bence Palfi of Eotvos Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary teamed up with Baylor University's Zoltan Kekecs and analyzed various real-life examples. They first built a formidable assortment of 180 stories describing stupid actions, collected via the internet and from daily reports provided by a group of 26 college students. Then, a group of seven raters reviewed all of the stories to ensure that they described a "stupid" action, were comprehensible, and were relatively brief.

From the data, the researchers distilled three key categories that make an action stupid. "The first situation in which people call an action stupid is when the actor takes high risks while lacking the necessary skills to perform the risky action," they explained. "A typical story for this is when burglars wanted to steal cell phones, but instead stole GPS navigation devices. They didn't switch them off so the police were able to track them easily. We named this category 'Confident ignorance.'"

The second cluster consisted of cases of "Absentmindedness—Lack of practicality." "A typical story here is when someone inflates more air in the car tires than allowed. Here the person either forgot to pay attention to the action or he or she doesn't know something essential about tire inflation."

Finally, the third category is "Lack of control." "Cases here are thought to be the result of obsessive, compulsive, or addictive behavior. For example, one of the stories in this category described a person who canceled a meeting with a good friend to instead continue playing video games at home," the researchers explained.

There you have it. Now, the next time your friend falls on their face while attempting to ride a shopping cart, you can tell them exactly why they were acting stupid.