How intelligent is your behaviour?

Carlo Cipolla's four quadrants of behaviour. The horizontal axis measures the effect on you, the vertical axis the effect on others. Helpless behaviour costs you and benefits them. Intelligent behaviour benefits both. Stupid behaviour costs both. Bandit behaviour benefits you at their expense. A dashed diagonal separates behaviour that creates value from behaviour that destroys it.

Every person you have ever found baffling sits somewhere on that grid.

So do you.

The dashed diagonal is the part most reproductions leave out, and it is the sharpest idea in the essay. Above the line, more value exists than before. Below it, less.

Intelligent behaviour always sits above. Behaviour that costs everyone always sits below. Bandit and helpless behaviour fall on either side, depending on how much gets transferred and how much evaporates along the way. A bandit who takes ten from you and gains two has done something closer to stupid than to clever.

Every one of the four is a behaviour, available to anyone, on any given weekday.

Do you want to read the essay? Click here.

Preparing the reading.

Do the test

Twenty-two ordinary situations, from private life and working life. A family group chat. A salary review. A football in a cold neighbour’s garden.

Answer as things actually go, rather than as they should. Read your own pattern, or hold one difficult person in mind and read theirs.

Four minutes, give or take, and everything stays in your browser.

Then the part worth staying for: Describe one personal situation that is bothering you, and you get back the quadrant each person is standing in, yours included.

The other instrument