School on Applications of Nonlinear Systems to Socio-Economic Complexity

In this talk, we present an evolutionary game inspired by the original ideas of Carlo Cipolla about The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity. The game expands the classical scheme of two archetypical strategies, collaborators and defectors, by including two additional strategies. One of these strategies is associated with a stupid player that, according to Cipolla, is the most dangerous individual asit undermines the global wealth of the population. By considering a spatial evolutionary game and imitation dynamics that go beyond the paradigm of a rational player we explore the impact of Cipolla's ideas and analyze the extent of the damage that stupidplayers inflict on the population. We also show that the probability of behaving stupidly acts as a parameter that induces a phase transition in the steady distribution of strategies among the population.