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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37919
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/37919
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

### Terror, Cowardice, Selfishness and Greed.

"Stupid" mistakes need to be understandable or the story is not satisfying.

They can BE understandable if the stupidity is part of human nature: Somebody is overworked to exhaustion and makes the mistake. Somebody is engaging in a criminal exercise, and does something extremely short-sighted in order to save themselves from being captured. Somebody is a coward and in their panic to save themselves at any cost, does something stupid for the rest of humanity.

In Stephen King's The Stand, a virus escapes and kills 99% of humanity because one person, out of cowardice, violated every rule of containment to run away when the virus escaped in the lab; believing against all logic that perhaps he had NOT been infected. But he was. We can understand that as human nature, no matter how highly trained they are nobody wants to die, and faced with certain death if he obeys the rules and a microscopic chance of living if he breaks them, he chooses to break them, to save his own skin, and it truly is human nature (psychology) that a brain flooded with existential terror is NOT thinking rationally or with any empathy for strangers.

Mistakes can be made, stupid (short-sighted) errors can be made, but you need to ground them in the dark sides of human nature: Terror, cowardice, selfishness and greed.

Original score: 24