Well I read it again in large part because I had a feeling there was more to it than I was getting (the usual reason for me reading a book twice).  I was right.   I think the first time the book hit a cognitive bias of my own.  The word “stupid” was used way too much for my tastes.  The second reading I’d mostly got over my shock and disgust at the word and was able to focus on what the essays were digging into.  A lot of it was pretty funny.  

The Psychology of Stupidity – 
Edited Jean-François Marmion
2018 in Europe (where it was a best seller) 
Translation by Liesl Schillinger /2020
Read by several performers
Rating: 5 / essays -psychology
(Listened and read)  

The word “stupid” is very commonly used to describe or label a wide variety of people, places, things, actions, thoughts, and the list is endless.   But Marmion and the other essayists  also get into “bullshit,“ “idiot” and a few other select adjectives and appellations.  The word is so common in our society today that it’s used by almost everybody to describe almost anything the least bit annoying.  (“What a stupid movie,” “That stupid woman!” “That dinner was stupid,.” “What a stupid thing to say,” “That jerk is too stupid for words.” 

The use of the term is a plague on the planet and everyone has to deal with it no matter what language or profession although  Marmion admits “That notion does not belong to the social sciences” and I’ll agree (unless one practitioner calls the paper of another practitioner “stupid.”) 

The book covers a lot of different kinds of stupid or synonyms and words which are closely related.  There’s idiot, gullibility, slowness, imbecile, loon, moron. and more. The book also covers asshole, bullshit, folly, and hogwash, before he gets down to the ways our lives are affected by these things and how that works.  

He starts with Cognitives Bias which sets up for errors due to prediction based on our own internal skewed thinking.  And he goes on with Narcissistic Personality Disorder and how it shows up in people and the world.  

Thinking Fast and Slow by Kahneman is referred to often and Marmion even holds an interview with the Nobel Prize winning author which is delightfully right on.  

Because the book is a series of many short essays and conversations there is a disorganized feel to it but I enjoyed it. The best thing I can say for the book in general is that yes, this nonsense bothers everyone (except very rude people who don’t care what the rest of us have to put up with.