You know things are weird when bad boys are cool and good girls are boring. You know things are skewed when a person is deemed good solely on his bank account or her virginity. Okay, I’m being too dramatic, here…

It’s hard for me to define good and bad people in simple terms. But then, I read about Cipolla’s quadrant which divides people (or more precisely, people’s behavior) into 4 categories:

  1. Helpless people who are willing to suffer loss for other people’s benefits.
  2. Intelligent people who are capable of finding a win-win solution that benefits all parties involved.
  3. Bandits/Sociopathic people who are eager to get benefits to the detriment of other people.
  4. Stupid people who cause losses to other people without getting any benefit (or even suffer losses) from doing so.

Using this framework of thinking, my definition of good and bad people become simple:

  • Good people are those who don’t make me suffer losses (or more precisely, those who are not likely to make me suffer losses).
  • Bad people are those who make me suffer losses (or more precisely, those who are likely to make me suffer losses).

Using the 4 archetypes from Cipolla, we can simplify it even more: good people are helpless or intelligent, bad people are sociopathic or stupid.

Of course, in real life, a person can be one of the 4 archetypes at different times. Even if a person is intelligent most of the time, there’ll be times when he’d act in a sociopathic way or even in a stupid way.

Since I don’t trust anyone (including myself) to not act sociopathically or stupidly (at least some of the time), my general strategy on handling people is to:

  • avoid (stupid) people who have too much of a hard time seeing incentive structures
  • avoid (sociopathic) people who focus on short-term gain rather than long-term return
  • make sure we have mutually beneficial incentive structures (to prevent sociopathic acts)
  • make sure they know that those structures exist (to prevent stupid acts)