A new study has found solid evidence to prove that men do more stupid things compared to women.
Researchers from the UK-based Newcastle University based their findings on winners of The Darwin Awards, an honour given to people who were killed by their stupid actions.
The Darwin Award is decided according to different criteria, including the style of death.
The study looked at 413 Darwin Award nominations from 1995 to 2014. Fourteen cases were excluded from the analysis as the awards were shared by both men and women.
Data from 20 years showed that 88.7% of The Darwin Award winners were men.
Authors have mentioned a few cases in their study: a male thief who died when he unbolted a steel hawser from a lift shaft standing inside the lift; another man who attached a shopping trolley to a train for a free ride to home and a male terrorist who wrote his address on a letter bomb, without sticking enough postage stamps. He died after the letter was returned to him and when he opened it without thinking.
Of the 318 cases, only 36 women received the awards compared to 282 men. This has made the authors to support the male idiotic theory (MIT) that "men are idiots and idiots do stupid things."
However, the study found that women mostly nominated men for the tongue-in-cheek honour and alcohol played a huge role in men's stupid actions leading to the Darwin Award.
"Anecdotal data support the hypothesis that alcohol makes men feel "bulletproof" after a few drinks, and it would be naïve to rule this out," the authors while explaining their findings wrote.
"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. (Spoiler alert: the mine eventually exploded, demolishing the bar and killing all three men.)"
Findings of the study have been reported in the British Medical Journal (BMJ).
