Pallavi Gunalan’s tweet prompted a deluge of reactions. Many users chimed in with countless encounters where they witnessed their friends doing something ludicrous or downright dumb. Later on, Pallavi also posted a follow-up tweet about her friend’s situation: "I gave her an extra microwave I had. Really hoping she didn’t throw it away."
Well, let’s face it — we all have friends whose approach to life seems a little outlandish. While moments like these make us wonder whether people around us are not the smartest ones, we also start to remember the little mishaps we have done in our past. Basically, everyone has had their fair share of foolish moments.
While we easily brand many situations in life as "stupid", the word still sounds a bit subjective. Just think about a situation where you miss your bus stop, believe you’ll ace a test without studying, or trip over because you were captivated by your social media feed. According to scientists, we instantly call these things stupid because we are very quick to label it.
A study by researchers from Eotvos Lornand University in Hungary and Baylor University in Texas argue that studying why and when people call certain actions stupid can offer psychological insight. Not only because finding and declaring something as "stupid" is a simple everyday activity but also because it reflects how "people adjust their own behavior and expect others to."
The researchers wanted to find out "why we call certain actions stupid irrespective of [a person's] cognitive abilities," and to do that, they needed to understand what people mean by it. The main author of this study, Dr. Balázs Aczél, told Medical Daily that he and his colleagues were surprised to find very few studies have been done on this topic before.
While it may seem odd to learn how people decide that a thought or an action is straight-up dumb, scientists went on a mission to tackle this challenge. "Given how frequently we find situations in everyday life in which we do, or would, call someone's action 'stupid,' one would think we should understand when and why people experience this feeling," Dr. Aczél said.
Researchers collected and analyzed real-life examples of what people constitute as foolish. They gathered a sample of 180 news stories and other online content from news sites like The New York Times, BBC, and TMZ, and also blogs, forums, and other publicly available publications where people characterized actions described there as stupid.
They presented the stories to more than 150 Hungarian undergrad students, who had to fill out a questionnaire. People had to rate "the intensity of the stupidity on display," as well as explain why they thought any given action was stupid by choosing one of many categories (such as overconfidence and fatigue).
The researchers divided participants’ answers into three distinct categories. The first one was called confident ignorance, when someone takes risks without having adequate skills and knowledge — and overestimating oneself is the highest level of stupidity. As an example, they provided a story about a burglar who meant to steal cellphones but lifted GPS devices instead, which led the police straight to him.
The second kind of stupidity was called absentmindedness, and it refers to people who failed to do the right thing because of a distraction or, again, inadequate skills. The last category, a lack of control, results from obsessive or addictive behavior, "such as someone who cancels on a friend because they can’t pull themselves away from something."
Dr. Aczél revealed they found 90 percent of students agreed on whether they would call an action stupid or not. "It shows that we use this label very similarly. Based on this, we would think that we must know what 'stupid' means," he explained. "People often think that it is strongly linked to low IQ. Our findings show that people attribute stupid to three independent situations."
