How Stupid Can You Be? Science Counts the Ways!

Dear readers:

I saw this article in "Live Science" and I was immediately intrigued by it since one of my pet peeves is how normally intelligent people can hold ideas, and do things, that are totally STUPID! (I didn't put the disclaimer about political correctness right at the top of the front page for nothin'!)

After thinking about it for a while I decided that it might be stupid to reprint the article here on these pages, because not enough people would be interested.

BUT!

Then I started thinking that it might be stupid to not print the article, because those who agreed with it, would really appreciate its message! Besides, this blog is about stuff I find interesting, not necessarily what anybody else likes!(Fortunately enough people think like I do that we get around ten thousand eyeballs a month!!!)

Now I'm finding this whole explanation thing about the article a bit stupid, so I will just reprint parts of it here and let you decide:

by Stephanie Pappas, Live Science Contributor. 

Forrest Gump once said, "Stupid is as stupid does." Turns out, he was right.
New research finds that people judge actions as stupid for three primary reasons: The actions reflect a foolhardy level of risk, an absent-mindedness and lack of practicality, or an impulsive lack of control.
And though stupid is a bit of a catchall term, the researchers found that people are very quick to identify it. 
"People don't spend time on judging if something is stupid or not," study researcher Aczél Balázs told Live Science. "It comes instantaneously, and as our results showed, they have high agreement. If one person calls something stupid, there's a high likelihood others will do the same thing."
The reasons people do stupid things fell into three categories. The first, dubbed "confident ignorance," is when someone tackles something high-risk without the proper skills. The cellphone/GPS caper was an example of this kind of stupidity. The next category was "absent-mindedness," which applied to situations where people knew the right thing to do, but weren't paying close attention. One example would be walking out of the store without paying for your groceries, Balázs said. The third kind of stupidity was typified by lack of control, and occurred when people knew they shouldn't do something but couldn't fight their impulse to do it anyway. Reaching for a third slice of cake when you know you'll get a stomachache later is an example of this kind of stupidity, Balázs said.

Stupidity is an interesting concept because it doesn't always track with intelligence, Balázs said. Very high-IQ people can make extremely bone-headed moves. The new research reveals that judging a behavior "stupid" reveals the observer's expectations of how someone should behave, he said. But the person doing the stupid thing might be operating according to a different set of expectations or goals.

On a practical level, understanding why people call something stupid might provide better ways to call out dumb behavior, Balázs said. It might be more helpful to tell someone they're being overconfident than that they're being stupid, for example.
The researchers now plan to concentrate on the cognitive mechanisms people use to monitor others' behaviors. One mystery, Balázs said, is why people find stupidity so amusing, a fact that drives any number of Hollywood comedies and even widespread kudos (think the Darwin Awards).
"People want to watch other people doing something stupid as a source of amusement," he said.

 http://www.livescience.com/52968-what-is-stupid.html