What is stupid?

Manifestations of wisdom in ancient China: An analysis of the Zhinang Quanji

This study aims to use summarizing content analysis and descriptive analysis to examine features related to wisdom in Zhinang Quanji, a collection of classical Chinese wisdom stories by 17th-century writer Feng Menglong, so as to investigate the real-life manifestations of wisdom of ancient Chinese. The results are as follows: (1) the wisdom of ancient Chinese is mainly manifested in 20 different kinds of events. Among these, the following are the five instances of wisdom that appear most frequently: (a) act resourcefully and calmly as the situation demands to deal with emergencies; (b) assist those in a higher position (especially through admonishment or remonstration); (c) take note of even the finest detail and wisely settle disputes; (d) when in bureaucratic circles, clearly analyze the situation and plan far ahead; and (e) on the battlefield, ascertain the mentality of the enemy force, take them by surprise, and overcome them. (2) A total of 932 wise characters are included in Zhinang Quanji. Here, several characteristics are commonly found, including dominant maleness, numerical minority of persons aged under 18 and above 60, and predominance of characters who possess human wisdom. The current findings can provide a useful framework for understanding the manifestation of wisdom in concrete life contexts, thus helping us to better understand and grasp the meaning and nature of wisdom.

Plans or Outcomes: How Do We Attribute Intelligence to Others?

Humans routinely make inferences about both the contents and the workings of other minds based on observed actions. People consider what others want or know, but also how intelligent, rational, or attentive they might be. Here, we introduce a new methodology for quantitatively studying the mechanisms people use to attribute intelligence to others based on their behavior. We focus on two key judgments previously proposed in the literature: judgments based on observed outcomes (you're smart if you won the game) and judgments based on evaluating the quality of an agent's planning that led to their outcomes (you're smart if you made the right choice, even if you didn't succeed). We present a novel task, the maze search task (MST), in which participants rate the intelligence of agents searching a maze for a hidden goal. We model outcome-based attributions based on the observed utility of the agent upon achieving a goal, with higher utilities indicating higher intelligence, and model planning-based attributions by measuring the proximity of the observed actions to an ideal planner, such that agents who produce closer approximations of optimal plans are seen as more intelligent. We examine human attributions of intelligence in three experiments that use MST and find that participants used both outcome and planning as indicators of intelligence. However, observing the outcome was not necessary, and participants still made planning-based attributions of intelligence when the outcome was not observed. We also found that the weights individuals placed on plans and on outcome correlated with an individual's ability to engage in cognitive reflection. Our results suggest that people attribute intelligence based on plans given sufficient context and cognitive resources and rely on the outcome when computational resources or context are limited.

Addressing sustainable development goals for confronting climate change: Insights and summary solutions in the stress stupidity system

We employ the concept of stupidity to address why more has not been done to address climate change and sustainable development. While the ‘new’ science of stupid has long existed in organizational studies, academicians have been too polite to call it that and organizational researchers historically labeled it the ‘threat-rigidity effect.’ With Alvesson and Spicer’s ‘stupidity-based theory of organizations’ management researchers overcame this reluctance. In this work we explore what we will call the ‘stress-stupidity system.’ Building on the threat-rigidity effect, we outline the elements of the stress-stupidity system and look at how we may be able to ‘fix stupid’ to address issues of sustainability.

Why Real-World Problems Go Unresolved and What We Can Do about It: Inferences from a Limited-Resource Model of Successful Intelligence

In this article I suggest why a symposium is desirable on the topic of why, despite worldwide increases in IQ since the beginning of the 20th century, there are so many unresolved and dramatic problems in the world. I briefly discuss what some of these problems are, and the paradox of people with higher IQs not only being unable to solve them, but in some cases people being unwilling to address them. I suggest that higher IQ is not always highly relevant to the problems, and in some cases, may displace other skills that better would apply to the solution of the problems. I present a limited-resource model as an adjunct to the augmented theory of successful intelligence. The model suggests that increasing societal emphases on analytical abilities have displaced development and utilization of other skills, especially creative, practical, and wisdom-based ones, that better could be applied to serious world problems. I also discuss the importance of cognitive inoculation against unscrupulous and sometimes malevolent attempts to change belief systems.