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Researchers reveal theory on why men are idiots
Stupid is as stupid does: Researchers reveal bright theory on why men are idiots
Researchers from Newcastle University exploring sex differences have proven 'male idiot theory'
Johnny Knoxville and the guys are back in JACKASS 3D to be released by Paramount on October 15th, 2010. Photo: Undated handout courtesy of Paramount Pictures [PNG Merlin Archive]
Sharon Kirkey
Published: December 11, 2014, 6:30 pm
Newcastle University decided to test the theory by examining sex differences in “idiotic risk-taking behaviour” among Darwin Award nominees over a 20-year span. The Darwin Awards commemorate those who die not in accidental deaths but in idiotic accidents involving “astonishingly stupid methods,” the team writes in the annual Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal.
Past winners include an Iraqi terrorist who mailed a letter bomb with insufficient postage, only to have it explode in his face when he opened his own “return to sender” letter, and a man who died after hitching a shopping cart to the back of a train. He was dragged three kilometres to his death before the train could stop.
The finding, they conclude, supports their working hypothesis ‘that men are idiots and idiots do stupid things.’
Overall, males made up 88.7 per cent of Darwin Award winners over the study period, a “highly statistically significant” sex difference in idiotic risk-taking behaviour, the authors report.
The finding, they conclude, supports their working hypothesis “that men are idiots and idiots do stupid things.”
The paper, a departure from the BMJ’s usual diet of serious medical studies, appears in the journal’s Christmas edition, an annual issue featuring quirky scientific papers based on real data. This year’s offerings include a study on which magazines disappear fastest from doctors’ waiting rooms (gossipy magazines are more likely to go missing than The Economist or Time) and “what’s on your surgeon’s playlist?”
The male idiot theory study is described as the first systematic review of its kind.
It has been well established that men are more likely than women to be admitted to hospital with accidental or sports-related injuries. They’re also more likely to die in car crashes.
The Ottawa Hospital emergency room sees more male patients than female for traumas caused by misadventure. (File photo)
At The Ottawa Hospital, males represent the majority of trauma patients, according to figures provided to Postmedia News. In 2013-14, men accounted for 69 per cent of all trauma patients seen in emergency (446 men in total, compared to 200 women). Trauma cases involve unintentional falls, motor vehicle collisions and assault.
Cultural and social factors may partly explain sex differences in risk-seeking behaviour, the British team says. For example, men may be more likely than women to engage in contact sports or risky pursuits such as skydiving.
But the researchers focused on a class of risk in a league of its own — “idiotic” risk, defined as “senseless risks, where the apparent payoff is negligible or non-existent” and the outcome is usually very, very bad.
For their analysis, the researchers reviewed all Darwin Award nominations from 1995 to 2014. They relied on confirmed accounts only, excluding urban legends and “honourable mentions,” such as a man who lost a testicle while using a belt sander as an “auto-erotic” device. He repaired himself with a staple gun.
Of 332 nominations, men and women, typically “over-adventurous couples in compromising positions,” shared 14.
Of the 318 valid cases remaining, 282 awards were awarded to men, and just 36 to women.
The researchers caution women may be more likely to nominate men for a Darwin Award, or that a “reporting” bias may be at play, in that idiotic males may be more headline appealing than idiotic females.
Too much beer can contribute to idiotic behaviour by men: study. (Richard Arless Jr./ Montreal Gazette)
Alcohol may also be a factor, the researchers note. Booze can make men feel “bulletproof.” One 1999 Darwin Award went to three men who played a version of Russian roulette with an unexploded Cambodian landmine. Each took turns tossing back shots and then stamping on the mine. Eventually it exploded, killing all three. Everyone else had already fled the bar.
The authors — all males — were surprised at just how dramatic the gender difference was, “though in truth, I don’t think it surprised any of our female colleagues,” said co-author Dennis Lendrem, a project manager in the medical school at Newcastle University.
His 15-year-old son Ben, the first author, largely drove the study. One day, while reading out entries from one of the Darwin Awards books, he remarked that most of the award winners were male.
“I asked him why he thought that was. And he replied it was because men are idiots, which I thought was very wise for a 15-year-old,” Lendrem said.
He and his co-authors say that men appear not to stop and make any real assessment of the risk. “They just do it anyway.”
In one case, a man was demolishing a car park next to an office building. Office workers watching from the windows wondered how he was going to take down the final support without being crushed, “only to learn on the third day that he actually hadn’t made a plan,” Lendrem said. “The whole thing collapsed and he was crushed, including his digger.”
Lendrem’s favourite was the man using the belt sander. “It was wonderfully quick-witted of him to repair his scrotum with his staple gun. I thought that was just brilliant.”
Tools often feature prominently in Darwin awards for men. (National Post file photo)
Members of the Darwin Awards committee have posited that MIT may be driven by the group selection theory. “It’s about the survival of the species, and that these males are selflessly eliminating themselves from the gene pool in order that the average IQ of the species continues to increase, kind of thing,” Lendrem said.
But that doesn’t hold at an individual level. “Presumably, there has to be some kind of survival advantage to that kind of impulsive behaviour,” when it doesn’t end in death, he said.
Crazy risk-taking may also be a fallout or spillover of the “thrill-seeking,” risk-taking personality, saidTemple University psychologist Frank Farley.
“Men do this — pushing the edge — more than women historically, though that is changing fast,” Farley said.
“Going along with that are danger, harm and what some people label as idiocy.”
While tongue-in-cheek, there is a serious message to the study, Lendrem said. His co-author, Dr. Andy Gray, is an orthopedic trauma surgeon, “who literally picks up the pieces of that kind of impulsive behaviour every Friday and Saturday night in the emergency room.”
“I think we should be teaching people that there are high-risk situations where they will be tempted to act upon their impulse, and that maybe they should just pause, give it a second thought and then maybe take action,” Lendrem said.
“I think women do that naturally.”
skirkey@postmedia.com
twitter.com/sharon_kirkey
Read more Articles from Sharon Kirkey
Twitter.Com/Sharon_kirkey© COPYRIGHT - POSTMEDIA NEWS
Stupid is as stupid does: Researchers reveal bright theory on why men are idiots
Researchers from Newcastle University exploring sex differences have proven 'male idiot theory'
Johnny Knoxville and the guys are back in JACKASS 3D to be released by Paramount on October 15th, 2010. Photo: Undated handout courtesy of Paramount Pictures [PNG Merlin Archive]
Sharon KirkeyPublished: December 11, 2014, 6:30 pm
Newcastle University decided to test the theory by examining sex differences in “idiotic risk-taking behaviour” among Darwin Award nominees over a 20-year span. The Darwin Awards commemorate those who die not in accidental deaths but in idiotic accidents involving “astonishingly stupid methods,” the team writes in the annual Christmas issue of the British Medical Journal.
Past winners include an Iraqi terrorist who mailed a letter bomb with insufficient postage, only to have it explode in his face when he opened his own “return to sender” letter, and a man who died after hitching a shopping cart to the back of a train. He was dragged three kilometres to his death before the train could stop.
The finding, they conclude, supports their working hypothesis ‘that men are idiots and idiots do stupid things.’
Overall, males made up 88.7 per cent of Darwin Award winners over the study period, a “highly statistically significant” sex difference in idiotic risk-taking behaviour, the authors report.
The finding, they conclude, supports their working hypothesis “that men are idiots and idiots do stupid things.”
The paper, a departure from the BMJ’s usual diet of serious medical studies, appears in the journal’s Christmas edition, an annual issue featuring quirky scientific papers based on real data. This year’s offerings include a study on which magazines disappear fastest from doctors’ waiting rooms (gossipy magazines are more likely to go missing than The Economist or Time) and “what’s on your surgeon’s playlist?”
The male idiot theory study is described as the first systematic review of its kind.
It has been well established that men are more likely than women to be admitted to hospital with accidental or sports-related injuries. They’re also more likely to die in car crashes.
The Ottawa Hospital emergency room sees more male patients than female for traumas caused by misadventure. (File photo)
At The Ottawa Hospital, males represent the majority of trauma patients, according to figures provided to Postmedia News. In 2013-14, men accounted for 69 per cent of all trauma patients seen in emergency (446 men in total, compared to 200 women). Trauma cases involve unintentional falls, motor vehicle collisions and assault.
Cultural and social factors may partly explain sex differences in risk-seeking behaviour, the British team says. For example, men may be more likely than women to engage in contact sports or risky pursuits such as skydiving.
But the researchers focused on a class of risk in a league of its own — “idiotic” risk, defined as “senseless risks, where the apparent payoff is negligible or non-existent” and the outcome is usually very, very bad.
For their analysis, the researchers reviewed all Darwin Award nominations from 1995 to 2014. They relied on confirmed accounts only, excluding urban legends and “honourable mentions,” such as a man who lost a testicle while using a belt sander as an “auto-erotic” device. He repaired himself with a staple gun.
Of 332 nominations, men and women, typically “over-adventurous couples in compromising positions,” shared 14.
Of the 318 valid cases remaining, 282 awards were awarded to men, and just 36 to women.
The researchers caution women may be more likely to nominate men for a Darwin Award, or that a “reporting” bias may be at play, in that idiotic males may be more headline appealing than idiotic females.
Too much beer can contribute to idiotic behaviour by men: study. (Richard Arless Jr./ Montreal Gazette)
Alcohol may also be a factor, the researchers note. Booze can make men feel “bulletproof.” One 1999 Darwin Award went to three men who played a version of Russian roulette with an unexploded Cambodian landmine. Each took turns tossing back shots and then stamping on the mine. Eventually it exploded, killing all three. Everyone else had already fled the bar.
The authors — all males — were surprised at just how dramatic the gender difference was, “though in truth, I don’t think it surprised any of our female colleagues,” said co-author Dennis Lendrem, a project manager in the medical school at Newcastle University.
His 15-year-old son Ben, the first author, largely drove the study. One day, while reading out entries from one of the Darwin Awards books, he remarked that most of the award winners were male.
“I asked him why he thought that was. And he replied it was because men are idiots, which I thought was very wise for a 15-year-old,” Lendrem said.
He and his co-authors say that men appear not to stop and make any real assessment of the risk. “They just do it anyway.”
In one case, a man was demolishing a car park next to an office building. Office workers watching from the windows wondered how he was going to take down the final support without being crushed, “only to learn on the third day that he actually hadn’t made a plan,” Lendrem said. “The whole thing collapsed and he was crushed, including his digger.”
Lendrem’s favourite was the man using the belt sander. “It was wonderfully quick-witted of him to repair his scrotum with his staple gun. I thought that was just brilliant.”
Tools often feature prominently in Darwin awards for men. (National Post file photo)
Members of the Darwin Awards committee have posited that MIT may be driven by the group selection theory. “It’s about the survival of the species, and that these males are selflessly eliminating themselves from the gene pool in order that the average IQ of the species continues to increase, kind of thing,” Lendrem said.
But that doesn’t hold at an individual level. “Presumably, there has to be some kind of survival advantage to that kind of impulsive behaviour,” when it doesn’t end in death, he said.
Crazy risk-taking may also be a fallout or spillover of the “thrill-seeking,” risk-taking personality, saidTemple University psychologist Frank Farley.
“Men do this — pushing the edge — more than women historically, though that is changing fast,” Farley said.
“Going along with that are danger, harm and what some people label as idiocy.”
While tongue-in-cheek, there is a serious message to the study, Lendrem said. His co-author, Dr. Andy Gray, is an orthopedic trauma surgeon, “who literally picks up the pieces of that kind of impulsive behaviour every Friday and Saturday night in the emergency room.”
“I think we should be teaching people that there are high-risk situations where they will be tempted to act upon their impulse, and that maybe they should just pause, give it a second thought and then maybe take action,” Lendrem said.
“I think women do that naturally.”
skirkey@postmedia.com
twitter.com/sharon_kirkey
Read more Articles from Sharon Kirkey
Twitter.Com/Sharon_kirkey© COPYRIGHT - POSTMEDIA NEWS
