The Darwin Awards: sex differences in idiotic behaviour

[jvalencia]

For those who didn't make it to the end, it's worth noting that there's a fair bit of tongue in cheek in there.

> We believe MIT deserves further investigation, and, with the festive season upon us, we intend to follow up with observational field studies and an experimental study—males and females, with and without alcohol—in a semi-naturalistic Christmas party setting.

[sjducb]

I feel like the paper lacks a discussion about why males are more likely to take risks.

Typically extremely reproductively successful men like Chengis Khan take enormous risks to get the power and status that leads to high reproductive success. Unfortunately we are all descended from those men.

[globular-toast]

Presumably the presence of risk-taking males is advantageous to the species as a whole. If our species was asexual each individual would have to be fairly risk averse as any individual lost is lost breeding capacity. But in a sexual species a lost male is fine and happens all the time. Just losing males is, of course, pointless but presumably the advantages brought by the successful ones outweighs any disadvantages brought by the unsuccessful ones. This seems to be true when you look at unsuccessful males who just tend to sit out on the sidelines or whither away in silence rather than actively leech on society while successful males can be great leaders, innovators, visionaries etc.

It's perhaps easier to see why risk-taking behaviour is less common in females, though. In a sexual species each female is required to carry at least two children, on average, to merely replace the current population (it's also beneficial if she survives the final birth). The loss of a single female is therefore quite significant. A population with more risk-taking females would be less successful than one with less.

[photon_lines]

I don't feel like there needs to be a discussion on 'why' they take more risks. Females expand way more energy in having and raising kids than males do (within the human species). In other species (like sea-horses) - the females actually compete for males since males are the ones that expand way more energy in raising / producing children... (i.e. https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/seahorse.html).

[BobaFloutist]

I think it's far more likely that thousands of years of human society have encouraged and rewarded risk-taking behavior in men, and discouraged and punished it in women.

Remember, in any perspective on the differences of sexes, there's no control; no human being has ever been raised outside of human society and very few have ever been raised outside of male-dominated societies.

[bell-cot]

Neither propensity to high-risk behaviors, nor high intelligence, are reliably inherited. (Vs., say, blood types.)

Hence there are plenty of males who got the former, but not the latter.

[dehrmann]

My theory is that because of the sperm/egg relationship, survival of men is less critical to the survival of the species, so men are programmed to do more risky things, and the ones that survive are more fit.

[maxerickson]

It'd be interesting to try to identify highly represented individuals that were otherwise not historically notable.

[RGamma]

Your genetic influence will probably dilute over the generations and in response to environmental and cultural factors. Also, with randomness at play it may not make much of a difference after all. Properly assessing this empirically seems like a statistical nightmare.

[huytersd]

Unfortunately?

[grepLeigh]

This conclusion comes from 2 studies:

The first observes 1,000 students over 20 days at a single bus station in Liverpool. The second observes a single crossing point near the university.

[yedava]

Do Darwin Awards look at all of humanity or only a subset of it? Maybe there is a cultural component to behavior. Maybe there are cultures which don't treat men as idiots. How can anyone assert that men are genetically stupid without controlling for culture?

[oh_sigh]

What culture treats men as idiots?

Yes, there are memes about clueless men, but there are also memes about clueless women - in fact, we have an entire genre of "blonde jokes" about them - which, note, are 99% about blonde women, not blonde men. The fact that these memes exist doesn't mean that society treats men(or women) as clueless generally.

[dekhn]

It's non-scientific. It's kind of a joke paper written by an undergrad.

[photon_lines]

Haha...I'm surprised to find this on HN. Just to comment on a note made in this study: "While MIT provides a parsimonious explanation of differences in idiotic behavior and may underlie sex differences in other risk seeking behaviors, it is puzzling that males are willing to take such unnecessary risks—simply as a rite of passage, in pursuit of male social esteem, or solely in exchange for “bragging rights.” Northcutt invokes a group selectionist, “survival of the species” argument, with individuals selflessly removing themselves from the gene pool."

The reason this happens is due to risk-taking behavior. Males take way more risks than females do - and you can find other studies which confirm this (i.e. for example this one: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/147470490800600...). When I read the Northcutt explanation for this I laughed -- it makes absolutely 0 sense and I can't believe that someone expanded energy in proposing this. It's absolutely ridiculous that someone would even suggest this, but meh.

[SkyMarshal]

There was at least one hypothesis floating around a while ago that males take more risks because they’re expendable to society, but females are not. If a society is decimated by a famine, disease, war, etc, it can be repopulated with just a few males, but requires many females. Thus males evolved to be more risk-taking and females more risk-averse.

At an individual level, the incentive may be social esteem/bragging rights, or it may be based on a calculation of greater risk = greater reward = more resources = more mating options, etc. It’s not that males are “selflessly removing themselves from the gene pool”, but that there’s some incentive and/or lack of disincentive to be more risk-taking.

[lelanthran]

> It's absolutely ridiculous that someone would even suggest this, but meh.

It is, but note that someone suggested the very same thing below.

Anyone who has ever been out their front door knows why men take more risks - it's because riskier behaviour gets them laid more often, with more different women.

Being the top-dog amongst your male peers gets you more women. To get to the top-dog spot you need to take a ton of risks (challenging existing leaders, creating your own subgroup, learning new skills, etc).

[setgree]

If only more academic papers were written so clearly and engagingly:

> According to “male idiot theory” (MIT) many of the differences in risk seeking behaviour, emergency department admissions, and mortality may be explained by the observation that men are idiots and idiots do stupid things.

> there can be little doubt that Darwin Award winners seem to make little or no real assessment of the risk or attempt at risk management. They just do it anyway. In some cases, the intelligence of the award winner may be questioned. For example, the office workers watching a construction worker demolishing a car park in the adjacent lot must have wondered about the man’s intelligence. After two days of office speculation—how does he plan to remove the final support to crash the car park down safely?—they discovered, on the third day, that he didn’t have a plan. The concrete platform collapsed, crushing him to death and flattening his mini-excavator.

[readthenotes1]

Is the MIT just the low side of the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis?

[elzbardico]

This is so deliciously meta:

A study about Darwin Awards worthy of an Ignobel Prize.

[readthenotes1]

I have no idea why you're being downvoted. I can only attribute it as an expression of MIT