As a journalist who just happens to be male, you won’t be surprised to know I find this sort of research confronting. Could this be some kind of payback from the long-repressed female species? Is this part of a conspiracy to bring down men a peg or two?
According to the BMJ study paper’s authors: “Sex differences in risk seeking behaviour, emergency hospital admissions, and mortality are well documented.
“However, little is known about sex differences in idiotic risk taking behaviour. This paper reports a marked sex difference in Darwin Award winners: males are significantly more likely to receive the award than females.”
In fact, the study found 88.7 per cent of Darwin Award recipients were male.
It was a male - 15-year-old Ben Alexander Daniel Lendrem from Newcastle in the UK that hatched the idea to use the Awards as a gauge of idiocy.
Another male, his father Dennis Lendrem, a statistician, also assisted in the study along with two other males - Andy Gray, consultant orthopaedic trauma surgeon at Newcastle’s Royal Victoria Infirmary and John Dudley Isaacs, director of the Institute of Cellular Medicine, in the UK.
For those unfamiliar with the Darwin Awards, they highlight acts of stupidity around the globe that result in the protagonist coming to a fatal demise or something just as bad.
The legendary institution describes itself like this: “The Darwin Awards honor those who do the most to improve our gene pool-- by removing themselves from it, thereby ensuring that the next generaton is descended from one fewer idiot.”
To understand how you would need to die to earn the descriptor of “idiot”, you can visit www.darwinawards.com
The study published in the BMJ says a body of evidence suggests men take part in the kinds of activities that you’d logically expect would have them claiming a greater proportion of Awards.
“Sex differences in mortality and admissions to hospital emergency departments have been well documented and hypotheses put forward to account for these differences,” the research paper says.
“These studies confirm that males are more at risk than females. Males are more likely to be admitted to an emergency department after accidental injuries, more likely to be admitted with a sporting injury, and more likely to be in a road traffic collision with a higher mortality rate.
“Some of these differences may be attributable to cultural and socioeconomic factors: males may be more likely to engage in contact and high risk sports, and males may be more likely to be employed in higher risk occupations.”
But the paper says the disparity in the levels of risk-seeking behaviour between the respective sexes are reported from an early age, raising questions about the extent to which you can attribute such behaviour to social and cultural differences.
Exacerbating male idiocy, according to the paper, are a couple of factors – the first is what appears to be almost exclusive participation by men in a new class of “idiotic” risk and the other is the controversial “male idiot theory” which researchers have resurrected.
“There is a class of risk—the “idiotic” risk—that is qualitatively different from those associated with, say, contact sports or adventure pursuits such as parachuting,” the paper says.
“Idiotic risks are defined as senseless risks, where the apparent payoff is negligible or non-existent, and the outcome is often extremely negative and often final.
“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.”
Anecdotal data supports MIT, but to date there has been no systematic analysis of sex differences in idiotic risk taking behaviour.
“In this paper we present evidence in support of this hypothesis using data on idiotic behaviours demonstrated by winners of the Darwin Award,” the paper says.
Collectively, the four men who carried out this study have probably provided the clearest evidence that men are idiots - their study has delivered another battering to the reputation of men on this planet (well maybe I’m over-dramatising this, the study was clearly tongue in cheek – wasn’t it?).
It must be asked what encouraged them to go ahead with this study? Did they receive some kind of enticement by representatives of the opposite sex? And if that was to be the case, then there’s a possibility they’ve acted corruptly.
It might even be worth referring this onto the Independent Commission Against Corruption in NSW. Granted it’s very clearly out of their jurisdiction, but so what? It hasn’t stopped ICAC before, especially when there’s solid potential for a few quick and nasty headlines.
In the meantime, it’s my duty as a journalist to find other studies for this article, to provide more balance on where academia sits in relation to the intellect and talents of the respective sexes.
In fact, the question of whether there’s any correlation between sex difference and intelligence, is one that has intrigued both the scientific research community and the world’s citizens alike.
Evolutionary psychologist Satoshi Kanazawa, from the London School of Economics and Political Science, said the common ground within the intelligence research community over the second half of the 20th century was that that men and women had the same average intelligence, but men had greater variance in their distribution than women.
“Most geniuses were men, and most imbeciles were men, they said, while most women were in the normal range,” Dr Kanazawa says on the website, Psychology Today.
“This conclusion, however, was manufactured out of political expediency. Not wanting to discover, or a priori denying, any sex differences in intelligence, psychometricians simply deleted from the standardized IQ tests any item on which the performance of men and women differed.”
But he says that more recently, especially since the turn of the millennium, there have been an increasing number of studies that cast doubt on this politically correct conclusion.
Studies with large representative national samples from Spain, Denmark, and the United States, as well as meta-analyses of a large number of published studies throughout the world, all conclude that men on average are slightly but significantly more intelligent than women, by about 3-5 IQ points.
“So this has now become the new (albeit tentative) consensus in intelligence research,” he says.
But many in the intelligence research community believe the differences registered in IQ testing during multiple studies carried out between 2000 and 2010 are statistically insignificant and that men and women are roughly as intelligent as eachother.
In July 2012, there were widespread media reports that the pendulum had swung the other way, with women recording an IQ advantage of up to five (5) points over men.
The news emerged during analysis of the results of a series of international studies by a world authority on IQ testing, Prof James Flynn, Professor Emeritus at the University of Otago (in New Zealand) and a Distinguished Associate of the Psychometrics Centre at the University of Cambridge in the UK.
The studies were published in Prof Flynn’s most recent book, called the “Flynn Effect,” where he details the phenomenon of substantial increases in a nation’s IQ testing decade on decade.
Prof Flynn says there are several explanations for the trend, among them that societies become more complex over time, education develops, and nutrition improves.
“In the last 100 years the IQ scores of both men and women have risen but women’s have risen faster,” Flynn says. “This is a consequence of modernity. The complexity of the modern world is making our brains adapt and raising our IQ.”
He adds that the “improvement is more marked for women than for men because they were disadvantaged in the past.”
