Study: Men Are More Likely to Die From Doing Dumb Things

__Because Friday:__According to a new study just published in the British Medical Journal (no, not the Onion—though the BMJ does tend to get a little silly at the end of the year), men are far more likely than women to die from doing "idiotic" things.

Yes. "Idiotic" things—that's a technical term.

The paper points out that while data has long established that men are more likely to engage in more impulsive and high-risk behavior leading to death, they're also far more statistically liable to behave like idiots: "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. Idiotic risks are defined as senseless risks, where the apparent payoff is negligible or nonexistent, and the outcome is often extremely negative and often final."

Authored by a student, an orthopedic trauma surgeon, and a project manager as well as a director from the Institute of Cellular Medicine, the paper—titled "The Darwin Awards: Sex Differences in Idiotic Behaviour"—examines 20 years of fatal data from the Darwin Awards, which catalogs foolish behavior (not always leading to death).

They propose something called the Male Idiot Theory (MIT), which states that "men are idiots and idiots do stupid things," and found that it's the most likely explanation behind the results of the statistical analysis—which found that over the course of 20 years, Darwin Award winners who died as a result of their decisions comprised 88.7 percent men.

And while the analysts point out there may be outside factors at stake—over-reporting of men's idiotic behavior and, perhaps, a link to alcohol:

Anecdotal data support the hypothesis that alcohol makes men feel "bulletproof" after a few drinks, and it would be naive to rule this out. For example, the three men who played a variation on Russian roulette alternately taking shots of alcohol and then stamping on an unexploded Cambodian land mine.