The world is not destroyed by psychopaths, but by human stupidity, stubbornness, and the conviction that we are right..

In business and popular discourse, an idea has been circulating for years that the key problems of organizations and society are caused by “difficult and dangerous characters,” psychopaths, narcissists, and manipulative individuals. This is a narrative that sells well because it offers a simple explanation and a clear culprit. However, when the focus shifts from individual deviations to the way people actually make decisions, the picture becomes less dramatic but significantly more uncomfortable.

As a rule, systems are not destroyed by extremes. They are destroyed by the average.

More precisely, by a combination of three seemingly banal elements: limited understanding, resistance to changing one's mind, and high confidence in one's own assessment.

In everyday language, we call this stupidity, stubbornness, and the conviction that we are right. In a scientific framework, it is a well-documented dynamic of miscalibration of one's own knowledge and weak correction mechanisms.

One of the most famous phenomena describing this occurrence is the Dunning-Kruger effect. At its core, this effect shows that people with a lower level of competence tend to overestimate their own ability, while more competent individuals often underestimate their own assessments. However, what is often overlooked in popular interpretation is that the problem is not just in the misjudgment, but in the lack of opportunity to recognize that judgment as wrong.

In other words, it is not crucial what someone doesn't know. It is crucial that they lack the tool to recognize it.

This brings us to the concept of metacognition, the ability to observe and evaluate our own thinking. Metacognition is not an additional “soft” skill, as such skills are often called today, but a human capability-a regulator that determines whether we will scrutinize our own conclusions or implement them uncritically. In the context of decision-making, it functions as a filter between analysis and action.

Without this filter, even the most sophisticated analysis can end in a wrong decision.

The problem is further amplified by what is called the illusion of explanatory depth in psychology, or the tendency to believe that we understand complex systems much better than we actually do. People often have the feeling that they “get” how organizations, markets, or technologies work, until they are asked to explicitly explain that understanding. Then it turns out to be a superficial model that cannot withstand deeper analysis.

It is precisely this combination-superficial understanding and high confidence-that creates the ideal ground for wrong decisions.

In this context, stubbornness is not a character trait in the classical sense, but a functional problem in information processing. People naturally seek consistency between their beliefs and new information, which is well-described through confirmation bias. However, when this mechanism is intensified, a situation arises where information that contradicts an existing belief is not only ignored but actively rejected or reinterpreted.

In organizations, this has very concrete consequences. Decisions are not corrected based on new data; instead, data is adjusted to confirm decisions already made.

Thus, an error stops being an event and becomes a pattern. When all this is combined, you get a structure that is far more dangerous than individual deviations like psychopathy. Psychopaths can be destructive, but they are rare and relatively easy to recognize in functional systems. What is far harder to detect is normalized error-a situation where a large number of people make suboptimal decisions, convinced they are acting correctly.

This process is known in organizational literature as the “normalization of deviance”: deviations from optimal procedures become accepted because they do not produce immediate catastrophic consequences. Over time, the standard shifts, and the system begins to function at a lower level of decision-making quality, and without a clear sense that anything is wrong.

The key question that arises from this is not how to eliminate errors, but how to design systems that recognize and correct them. Because errors are inevitable. What is not inevitable is their repetition.

In this sense, the difference between functional and dysfunctional systems is not in how often they make mistakes, but in how quickly they learn from their own mistakes.

And that brings us back to the initial thesis. The world is not destroyed by those who do not know. It is destroyed by those who do not know but are convinced they do, and have no mechanism to stop them.

If this logic is translated to the organizational level, the implications are very concrete. The focus must shift from measuring outcomes to measuring the quality of the decision-making process. In other words, instead of asking how people feel after a decision, it is necessary to understand how the decision was made in the first place.

Because it is in this very process-in the way people evaluate their own knowledge, interpret information, and react to correction-that the difference is made between an organization or system that generates value and one that gradually loses it.

And here the circle closes. The problem was never with psychopaths. The problem is in a much more ordinary, yet systematically neglected pattern of human behavior.