I recently read that more than 250 people died between 2011 and 2017 taking selfies (so-called killfies). A Wikipedia entry gives a list of some of these deaths, as well as injuries, and categorises the fatalities as due to the following causes:
- Transport
- Electrocution
- Fall
- Firearm
- Drowned
- Animal
- Other
If you have a macabre sense of humour it makes for entertaining reading while also providing you with useful life tips: for example, don’t take selfies with a walrus.
More detail on some of these incidents can also be found here.
Meanwhile, this article includes the following statistically-based advice:
Humanity is actually very susceptible to selfie death. Soon, you will be more likely to die taking a selfie than you are getting attacked by a shark. That’s not me talking: that’s statistical likelihood. Stay off Instagram and stay alive
Yes, worry less about sharks, but a bit more about Instagram. Thanks Statistics.
The original academic article which identified the more than 250 selfie deaths is available here. It actually contains some interesting statistics:
- Men are more susceptible to death-by-selfie than women, even though women take more selfies;
- Most deaths occur in the 20-29 age group;
- Men were more likely to die taking high-risk selfies than women;
- Most selfie deaths due to firearms occurred in the United States;
- The highest number of selfie deaths is in India.
None of these conclusions seems especially surprising to me, except the last one. Why India? Have a think yourself why that might be before scrolling down:
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There are various possible factors. Maybe it’s because the population in India is so high. Maybe people just take more selfies in India. Maybe the environment there is more dangerous. Maybe India has a culture for high risk-taking. Maybe it’s a combination of these things.
Or maybe… if you look at the academic paper I referred to above, the authors are based at Indian academic institutes and describe their methodology as follows:
We performed a comprehensive search for keywords such as “selfie deaths; selfie accidents; selfie mortality; self photography deaths; koolfie deaths; mobile death/accidents” from news reports to gather information regarding selfie deaths.
I have no reason to doubt the integrity of these scientists, but it’s easy to imagine that their knowledge of where to look in the media for reported selfie deaths was more complete for Indian sources than for those of other countries. In which case, they would introduce an unintentional bias in their results by accessing a disproportionate number of reports of deaths in India.
In conclusion: be sceptical about any statistical analysis. If the sampling is biased for any reason, the conclusions almost certainly will be as well.
