11 ms·

The Darwin Awards: sex differences in idiotic behaviour

42 points by hpb42 3y ago

photon_lines 3y ago
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/10.1177/147470490800600104 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 3y ago
  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.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - Log_out_ 3y ago
    And it's more attractive cause with great risk comes great reward, thus men with breasts in leotards. (Forgive the marvel jib) Male risk taking behavior is more attractive to other males.
    - lupusreal 3y ago
      Men who are respected by many other men are more attractive to women than low status men.
      - Log_out_ 3y ago
        Not necessarily .. We worship fearless idiots who jump in wingsuits into rocks. Death cult lifestyle defiantly is not selected for via social hierarchy.
        SkyMarshal 3y ago
        Do we actually worship them, or cheer them on in the secretly morbid hope of seeing accidents, self-maimings, and Darwin Award events?
        lupusreal 3y ago
        > Not necessarily Of course it isn't true literally every single time, but it's certainly true on average. There is a strong correlation between a man being respected by many other men, e.g. high status among his peers, and that man being a stable reliable provider. If their is a famine, who gets cut off from the communal source of food first? The man all the other men like, or the man none of the other men respect? If the company is shedding dead weight who is more likely to get laid off? Who gets the best reviews from their colleagues and is most eligible for promotion? In all cases, the man most respected by other men has an advantage. Such men are desired by an larger than average portion of women. This in turn creates a reinforcing dynamic where women see a man being desired by women and in turn desire him for themselves more. This in turn causes even more men to respect him. Tldr it's good to be respected. And because respect begets more respect, it doesn't even necessarily matter how the respect was initially seeded. Having others witness you being respected is at least as important as doing something actually worthy of respect.
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    > 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. That's not the hypothesis the way I heard it - men are more expendable to society, but it's really a stretch to conclude that because men are more expendable, they make decisions with this knowledge in mind. I mean, really - there's no logic linking the two.
    - SkyMarshal 3y ago
      The logic may work via negation or inversion. Eg there is individual disincentive for both women and men to engage in high-risk behavior. But societies still needed a class of people to go out and hunt game, defend society from lions or opposing armies, or other higher-risk ventures, despite the individual disincentive to do so. Women are not expendable and thus society did not incentivize them to do these high-risk things. But men are, so societies created various social incentives to facilitate high-risk endeavors - honor, social esteem, medals, hierarchical rank, wealth, fame, etc. Many died doing so, but the ones that succeeded and survived reaped these various rewards and got to mate, producing heirs with similar risk-taking characteristics and capabilities from both nature and nurture.
    - k__ 3y ago
      Evolution doesn't look into the future. In the past, groups with women that were more risk averse would do better on average when the group was decimated and needed to repopulate. Groups with women that took too many risks didn't survive. So, now we have more risk aware women. Risk taking for men didn't have that of an impact and might even have proven beneficial (e.g., Genghis Kahn, etc.) Just my assumption...
      - bluGill 3y ago
        Don't forget a risk taking man may die but ensure the rest of the village (who he is closely related to) survives.
    - bumby 3y ago
      >they make decisions with this knowledge in mind I read it as an artifact of natural selection and natural selection does not work "with this knowledge in mind".
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > 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).
grepLeigh 3y ago
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.
sjducb 3y ago
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.
- photon_lines 3y ago
  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 https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/seahorse.html).
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    > I don't feel like there needs to be a discussion on 'why' they take more risks. Why not? Do you think that this: > Females expand way more energy in having and raising kids than males do (within the human species) Is the only answer applicable to "Why to males take more risk than females?"
    - photon_lines 3y ago
      Yes, because they have more to gain from taking the risk. Think about it for a moment.
      - bumby 3y ago
        The article's main thrust is a focus on risks that have negligible gain. So in that context your argument reads, "they have more to gain from a risk that has negligible gain."
        naasking 3y ago
jvalencia 3y ago
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.
elzbardico 3y ago
This is so deliciously meta: A study about Darwin Awards worthy of an Ignobel Prize.
- readthenotes1 3y ago
  I have no idea why you're being downvoted. I can only attribute it as an expression of MIT
yedava 3y ago
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?
- dekhn 3y ago
  It's non-scientific. It's kind of a joke paper written by an undergrad.
- oh_sigh 3y ago
  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.
  - yedava 3y ago
    You can see it here on this discussion, or even in general on HN. It is taken as a given that men are hard wired to optimize for getting laid and all their behaviors follow from that. It's like culture is irrelevant and humans are resigned to act out their genetics.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
setgree 3y ago
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 3y ago
Is the MIT just the low side of the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis?

42 points by hpb42 3y ago

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/10.1177/147470490800600104 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 3y ago
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.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Log_out_ 3y ago
  And it's more attractive cause with great risk comes great reward, thus men with breasts in leotards. (Forgive the marvel jib) Male risk taking behavior is more attractive to other males.
  - lupusreal 3y ago
    Men who are respected by many other men are more attractive to women than low status men.
    - Log_out_ 3y ago
      Not necessarily .. We worship fearless idiots who jump in wingsuits into rocks. Death cult lifestyle defiantly is not selected for via social hierarchy.
      - SkyMarshal 3y ago
        Do we actually worship them, or cheer them on in the secretly morbid hope of seeing accidents, self-maimings, and Darwin Award events?
      - lupusreal 3y ago
        > Not necessarily Of course it isn't true literally every single time, but it's certainly true on average. There is a strong correlation between a man being respected by many other men, e.g. high status among his peers, and that man being a stable reliable provider. If their is a famine, who gets cut off from the communal source of food first? The man all the other men like, or the man none of the other men respect? If the company is shedding dead weight who is more likely to get laid off? Who gets the best reviews from their colleagues and is most eligible for promotion? In all cases, the man most respected by other men has an advantage. Such men are desired by an larger than average portion of women. This in turn creates a reinforcing dynamic where women see a man being desired by women and in turn desire him for themselves more. This in turn causes even more men to respect him. Tldr it's good to be respected. And because respect begets more respect, it doesn't even necessarily matter how the respect was initially seeded. Having others witness you being respected is at least as important as doing something actually worthy of respect.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > 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. That's not the hypothesis the way I heard it - men are more expendable to society, but it's really a stretch to conclude that because men are more expendable, they make decisions with this knowledge in mind. I mean, really - there's no logic linking the two.
  - SkyMarshal 3y ago
    The logic may work via negation or inversion. Eg there is individual disincentive for both women and men to engage in high-risk behavior. But societies still needed a class of people to go out and hunt game, defend society from lions or opposing armies, or other higher-risk ventures, despite the individual disincentive to do so. Women are not expendable and thus society did not incentivize them to do these high-risk things. But men are, so societies created various social incentives to facilitate high-risk endeavors - honor, social esteem, medals, hierarchical rank, wealth, fame, etc. Many died doing so, but the ones that succeeded and survived reaped these various rewards and got to mate, producing heirs with similar risk-taking characteristics and capabilities from both nature and nurture.
  - k__ 3y ago
    Evolution doesn't look into the future. In the past, groups with women that were more risk averse would do better on average when the group was decimated and needed to repopulate. Groups with women that took too many risks didn't survive. So, now we have more risk aware women. Risk taking for men didn't have that of an impact and might even have proven beneficial (e.g., Genghis Kahn, etc.) Just my assumption...
    - bluGill 3y ago
      Don't forget a risk taking man may die but ensure the rest of the village (who he is closely related to) survives.
  - bumby 3y ago
    >they make decisions with this knowledge in mind I read it as an artifact of natural selection and natural selection does not work "with this knowledge in mind".
lelanthran 3y ago
> 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).

grepLeigh 3y ago

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.

sjducb 3y ago

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.

photon_lines 3y ago
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 https://oceanservice.noaa.gov/facts/seahorse.html).
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > I don't feel like there needs to be a discussion on 'why' they take more risks. Why not? Do you think that this: > Females expand way more energy in having and raising kids than males do (within the human species) Is the only answer applicable to "Why to males take more risk than females?"
  - photon_lines 3y ago
    Yes, because they have more to gain from taking the risk. Think about it for a moment.
    - bumby 3y ago
      The article's main thrust is a focus on risks that have negligible gain. So in that context your argument reads, "they have more to gain from a risk that has negligible gain."
      - naasking 3y ago

jvalencia 3y ago

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.

elzbardico 3y ago

This is so deliciously meta: A study about Darwin Awards worthy of an Ignobel Prize.

readthenotes1 3y ago
I have no idea why you're being downvoted. I can only attribute it as an expression of MIT

yedava 3y ago

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?

dekhn 3y ago
It's non-scientific. It's kind of a joke paper written by an undergrad.
oh_sigh 3y ago
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.
- yedava 3y ago
  You can see it here on this discussion, or even in general on HN. It is taken as a given that men are hard wired to optimize for getting laid and all their behaviors follow from that. It's like culture is irrelevant and humans are resigned to act out their genetics.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]

setgree 3y ago

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 3y ago

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