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Foolishness

Lack of social norms causing offence or similar effect

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Foolishness is the inability or failure to act following reason due to lack of judgment, stupidity, stubbornness, etc. The things such as impulsivity and/or influences may affect a person's ability to make reasonable decisions. Other reasons of apparent foolishness include naivety, gullibility, and credulity. Foolishness differs from stupidity, which is the lack of intelligence. An act of foolishness is called folly. A person who is foolish is called a fool. The opposite of foolishness is prudence.

01Concept

Andreas Maercker in 1995 defined foolishness as rigid, dogmatic, and inflexible thinking which makes feelings of bitterness and probable annoyance. It is considered the foundation of illusions of grandiosity like omniscience, omnipotence and inviolability.

Several proverbs from the Book of Proverbs characterize traits of foolishness.

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Sources and credits

This article is adapted from the Wikipedia article Foolishness, written by its contributors and licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0. Fathomly has changed the layout, removed citation markers, navigation and maintenance notices, and adjusted punctuation. This adapted version is shared under the same license. For references, see the original article.

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