News in Science

Study sinks 'women and children first' myth

Surviving shipwrecks Women and children first? Not likely, according to a new Swedish study of shipwrecks.

Faced with life-and-death situations, human behaviour tends more toward "every man for himself" say economists Mikael Elinder and Oscar Erixson, from the University of Uppsala.

They studied 18 different maritime disasters, including 16 previously unstudied shipwrecks, between the 1850s and 2011. Their aim was to test whether reports of chivalrous self-sacrifice during the sinking of the Titanic were exceptional.

Disappointingly, they found that famous images of men giving up their lives as the ship went down were the opposite of what has generally happened.

"The main difference between Titanic and the great majority of the other shipwrecks in our sample is the survival rate of women, which is substantially higher onboard the Titanic," Erixson says.

"In fact, Titanic and the HMS Birkenhead are the only two shipwrecks in our sample in which women have a survival advantage over men." HMS Birkenhead sank in 1852, with the loss of 365 lives.

On the Titanic, more than 70 per cent of female passengers survived, compared to less than 20 per cent of men, according to the report in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

By contrast, the average survival rate across the 16 other unstudied wrecks was less than 30 per cent for women and closer to 40 per cent for men.

And while children fared better than men onboard the Titanic, this wasn't the case in the majority of shipwrecks. "Children appear to have the lowest survival rate," write Elinder and Erixson.

Down with the ship

Not content with sinking one chivalrous myth, the Swedes also blow out of the water the idea that the captain always goes down with the ship.

Among the 16 previously unstudied shipwrecks in their analysis, only nine captains actually died during the disaster. Overall crew members had a higher survival rate than passengers.

"The most stunning finding from the other shipwrecks is of course the low survival rate of women and children, but also the relatively high survival rate of crew members and captains," says Erixson.

"The later observation is certainly not what one would expect given that the crew, and the captain in particular, are responsible for evacuating the passengers before putting themselves in safety."

Given their dire findings, the researchers ask themselves why the women and children first rule applied on some ships and not others.

"One possible explanation is that the captain onboard the Titanic ordered 'women and children first', and also threatened the men who disobeyed the order with violence," says Erixson.

The scientists say the intent of the study was to examine whether social norms of helping behaviour are upheld in situations characterised by extreme stress and danger.

"As economists we would assume that people would comply with a certain norm if the benefits exceed the cost," says Erixson.

"Based on our results it seems as if the cost of norm compliance is higher than the benefit, which in turn could be interpreted as if people find it rational to save themselves rather than helping others."

This doesn't mean that it's always a case of every man for himself, he stresses. "We base our conclusions on 'the average' individual," he says. "There of course may be some people for whom the cost-benefit calculation gives the opposite result."