What is “Male Idiot Theory”?

A scientific study supports the idea that men are, well, idiots. What is less clear is why.

Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash

I have witnessed male friends do many stupid things. Snorting chilli powder. Drinking a glass full of poolwater (and then vomiting all afternoon). Shaving off one eyebrow (the weekend before a big job interview). Having a chilli eating competition. Jumping over a fire (which, inevitably, ended up becoming jumping in to a fire). All of these feats were done as dares, or just randomly, out of nowhere, as some strange competition that cropped up between friends.

Scientists have a name for this: the “Male Idiot Theory.” In a tongue-in-cheek, but scientifically rigorous, article published in the prestigious British Medical Journal in 2014, researchers led by Ben Lendrem showed that men are more likely than women to engage in high-risk activities for which the payoff is negligible, or non-existent.

Evidence for this was found by examining the winners of the Darwin awards, prizes that are handed out at random times for people who have died (or sterilised themselves) through a very stupid activity. “The Darwin Awards salute the improvement of the human genome by honoring those who accidentally remove themselves from it in a spectacular manner!” writes the website, cheerily.

Amongst the winners of the Darwin awards are such unlucky candidates as a terrorist who failed to put enough postage on a letter bomb. When it was returned to him, he unthinkingly opened it, and died from the explosion (What I find particularly interesting here is that he was conscientious enough to put a return address on his letter bomb).

Then there was Robert, the daredevil who decided to ride his jetski off the Niagra falls. He’d fitted his jetski with a rocket booster, and was carrying a parachute. The plan was to fire the booster before hitting the falls, and open the parachute at the apex of his flight before drifting safely down to the water below. But he forgot that in waterfalls, there is water, and neither his rocket booster nor his parachute worked while wet. The booster failed to ignite, the parachute failed to open, and Robert plummeted to his death.