Stupidity the Next Pandemic?

Events on the world or national stage must surely cast doubt over educator Ken Robinson’s assertion that we should not so much be asking how intelligent people are as how they are intelligent (K. Robinson, The Element, NY: Viking, 2009, p.43). Look at Greece’s economic meltdown accompanied with strikes and entitlement protests only making matters worse. Or consider sports fans like those rioting in the streets of otherwise sedate Vancouver because their team lost the Stanley Cup (not as in misplacing the trophy but as in being decisively outplayed by Detroit). Then turn to the TSA’s latest ham-handed faux pas in a screener’s browbeating of an ailing, 95-year-old passenger who had to surrender her Depends undergarment or miss her flight. How is this intelligent, indeed? Perhaps the better questions to ponder are, “How are we stupid? Or how are we this stupid?”


Next look at how TSA managed damage control on the foregoing story by crowing that they did not actually strip-search the woman or take away her undergarment. No, they just gave her options like not being able to make her flight unless she abandoned it (per CNN’s June 27 account at http://www.cnn.com/2011/TRAVEL/06/27/florida.tsa.incident/index.html). This public relations statement makes things better? Now the questions become, “How stupid are we? Or, how stupid are we supposed to be?”

Toleration for stupidity is growing in proportion to its global spread, and there are common threads running through active practitioners of such stupidity. One of the threads is the tie between this kind of hostile behavior against innocuous targets and the power and status of those responsible for the stupidity in question. [For illumination on this subject, see J. C. Magee and A. D. Galindky, “Social Hierarchy: The Self-Reinforcing Nature of Power and Status, The Academy of Management Annals, Volume 2, August 2008, pp. 351-398.] It is a safe bet to infer that the agents of stupidity have relatively little status in their respective worlds. Jobless anarchists, drunken sports fans, and even the vast majority of hard-working but eternally vilified TSA inspectors enjoy the relative status of whale droppings – which must be at the bottom of the ocean. Having no status in the public eye, some nevertheless retain a certain power to compensate. It is the power of the small to take out their frustrations on people or objects unable to defend themselves. If you can’t win the game, you upset the checkerboard.

So these displays of maleficence, or stupidity, linger and proliferate, absent an injection of adult mind into the swirl of adolescently botched events. The situation recalls the favorite aphorism of my business law professor in an MBA program:


This life’s hard, but it’s harder if you’re stupid.
--George V. Higgins: The Friends of Eddie Coyle

But wait. There is more. Could things actually be getting worse? One New Yorker, in subtle refutation of the title of a New York Times reporter’s faith in The Wisdom of Crowds (J. Surowiecki, NY: Anchor Books, 2004) recently drew attention to the subtle trend for the benefit of responders. Writing in Watchline (Issue 06.23.11), a weekly one-pager created for enhancing fire fighter situational awareness in New York that has since gone quietly viral in the response community, FDNY’s Captain Sean Newman had this to say about the phenomenon:

Researcher Determines that Stupidity is Contagious

An Austrian psychologist has released a study in the journal Media Psychology (http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/15213269.2011.573461)claiming that being exposed to “stupid” behavior, in this case reading a story about soccer hooligans, lowered a test groups’ average test score compared to a control group, according to the Wall Street Journal (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304319804576387660130445524.html). Students who read the hooligan story, and did not have mechanisms to distance themselves from the protagonist, scored 5-7 percent less than the control group on a “difficult” test covering geography, science and arts.

Assessment: Scientists have proposed the infectiousness of behavior (and ideas)since at least the late 19th Century. Gustave LeBon introduced the concept of contagion theory to describe crowd behavior, which he postulated was driven by the unconscious mind. Later, convergence theory took hold, claiming that participants share a common disposition in close proximity. These theories suggest that the crowd collectively accepts a new norm, which justifies behavior that they would not normally practice. Today, crowd mitigation efforts focus on the Elaborated Social Identity Model(ESIM), stating that temporary identity with the crowd becomes “salient,” or prominent. ESIM has caused a shift in crowd management away from aggressive police tactics, such as challenging mobs with riot gear, which may provoke the group, to more subtle forms of behavior modification such as crowd “self-policing,” identity transfer, and police/crowd education efforts.

What do all these events communicate to a security professional? Two things:

-- Job security, for the essence of stupidity is that it will always stimulate the demand for protection from its expression.
-- A rueful nod to this wisdom seen in Pike’s Place Market, Seattle, on a T-shirt for sale among tourist trinkets:

Stupid kills – But not near enough.

-- Nick Catrantzos

Hurricane Lesson: Riot Watch

In the pantheon of devastating events, hurricanes rank high. One of the few handles a hurricane offers defenders for at least mitigating loss if not taking charge is that you can see it coming, hence the benefit of hurricane watch and hurricane warning. Indeed, official sites exist to explain the difference between the two (such as www.nhc.noaa.gov/HAW2/english/basics.shtml). Why not apply similar lessons to riots, such as the sore loser Stanley Cup riot that Vancouver experienced yesterday?

Some fundamental differences compel attention, however. First, a hurricane is a natural disaster. A riot is an induced catastrophe. (Mayer Nudell first breathed life into this distinction for me in his classic Handbook for Effective Emergency and Crisis Management, available at www.amazon.com/Handbook-Effective-Emergency-Management-Low-Intensity.) Consequently, there are fewer political impediments to declaring a hurricane warning, an announcement that a hurricane is imminent, than to declaring a riot warning. After all, to declare a riot warning is to admit to failures of planning and prevention -- something that Vancouver's (or any jurisdiction's) leadership would hesitate to do for fear of inspiring lawsuits and removal from office. But what about a riot watch? Wouldn't this be more benign and easier for a police agency or merchant's association to announce every time a public event is likely to produce crowds, the sine qua non for mobs and riots?

Assuming this to be the case, what is a merchant to do? Again, transferring a lesson from hurricanes to riots may avail. Everyone has seen certain supplies run out as people prepare for hurricanes, including plywood and duct tape. If I were a merchant in downtown Vancouver, I would anticipate the destructive impact of a possible riot the same way a Floridian counterpart would try to minimize damage to the store in the face of an approaching hurricane. Seal off the shop. Affix plywood panels to cover the display windows, under the likely assumption that if any crowd is transiting the area in large numbers after being stoked on high emotions, liquor, or drugs, the best of glass-break sensors and intrusion alarms will never summon any response force that will be able to arrive in time to defend your property and source of livelihood. Private security will not be able to reach your store and police will have other, life safety priorities taking precedence over protecting your inventory. So, if you do not see to your own defenses, looters and vandals will likely face no impediment to stealing and destroying your shop and any others in their path. Under the circumstances, making access to your business just a little more difficult than to the next shop may make all the difference between staying in business and going broke.

Here is where I would veer a bit off the hurricane preparations, though. Paint the plywood in the colors of the local sports team, whatever it might be, and then stencil across these plywood window protectors a message of support for the local team. In Vancouver's case, the message would be, "Go Canucks!" Then, affix a small sign on your front door saying, "Closed for the game. Go Canucks, go." What does this do? For rioters whose inspiration or pretense for mayhem retains even the thinnest connection to the sporting event that drew them to congregate in the first place, your sign is the equivalent of a metaphorical cross before a vampire. Attacking your shop so adorned takes on the symbolic appearance of attacking one's own team -- sacrilege to even a drunken sports fan. Best of all, this serves your interests equally regardless of whether the home team wins or loses. Remember that riots increasingly break out among exuberant crowds even when they are celebrating home team victories as much as when they are lamenting home team defeats.

Do I have research-supported data guaranteeing this defense will work? Not at all. But compared to the high cost of insurance and potential exclusion of coverage for riot-related damage, a business owner may well feel there is more to gain than lose by trying it out.

-- Nick Catrantzos