This leads us nicely to Cipolla’s definition of stupidity (it is actually his 3rd law): ‘A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses’. (As an aside, we can now also see that the famous 'win-win scenario' often talked about by management school professors and negotiators, is nothing other than the intelligent pattern of behaviour described by Cipolla i.e. Using a simple notation, of + to indicate benefits and - to indicate losses, and S for self, O for others, Cipolla’s four behavioural patterns are: Helpless ( S -/ O +), Bandit ( S +/ O -), Intelligent ( S +/ O +), and Stupid ( S -/ O -). These factors are in principle orthogonal, objective, and quantitative, and Cipolla enumerates and names the four possibilities. Both of these laws bring to my mind the same kind of universality as Newton’s law of gravity - and also act both for tiny individual ‘purposive social actions’, and also for human follies which unfold on a monumental and disastrous scale.Ĭipolla defines two factors which need to be evaluated when considering a pattern of human behaviour, (i) the benefits and losses that an individual causes to him or herself, and (ii) the benefits and losses that an individual causes to others. The second is a set of linked ‘laws’, called The basic laws of human stupidity, which were developed by the Italian economic historian Carlo M. The first, is of course the Law of the unanticipated consequences of purposive social action, first promulgated as such by Robert K Merton in 1936. However, after many years of looking, I believe that there are a few ‘laws of social science’ that have a near universal domain.

In the social sciences, the state of affairs is generally not so clear-cut. Note that the ‘laws of physics’ act independently of whether human beings either understand these laws, or have a way of using them.

This law is sufficient to explain why the coffee you spilt this morning will drop to the floor, and also why our solar system (‘…the gravitationally bound system of the Sun and the objects that orbit it’), has remained turning for the past 4.6 billion years. This is well illustrated with Newton’s law of universal gravitation, which states that: ‘every particle attracts every other particle in the universe with a force which is directly proportional to the product of their masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between their centres’.

One of the wonderful things about the physical sciences is that with a small number of compact ‘laws’, plus some basic commitments to logical thinking, we can understand how the physical universe works.

The fundamental laws of human stupidity