The destructive effect of human stupidity: a revision of Cipolla’s fundamental laws

Abstract

In this work, we analyze an evolutionary game that incorporates the ideas presented by Carlo Cipolla in “The fundamental laws of human stupidity”. The game considers four strategies, three of them are inherent to the player behavior and can evolve via imitation dynamics, while the fourth one is associated with an eventual behavior that can be adopted by any player at any time with a certain probability. This fourth strategy corresponds to what Cipolla calls a stupid person. The probability of behaving stupidly acts as a parameter that induces a phase transition in the steady distribution of strategies among the population.