One of the research says that men had more sense of
humour than women. Hear the One About Men Being Funnier Than Women? Study Shows
Gender Stereotype That Men Are Funnier Than Women
Why do we think that men are funnier than women? Because
they are! And men are particularly responsive to other men's humor. Women,
however, find men funnier because they mistakenly attribute funny things to
men. Laura Mickes and her team, from the University of California, and Robert
Mankoff from The New Yorker, explore the reasons behind the stereotype that men
are funnier than women and find scientific proof to support it.
Their work appears online in Psychonomic Bulletin &
Review, published by Springer.
Both men and women seem to believe that men are funnier
than women. Why? One theory is that men use humor to impress potential
partners. Women often say they prefer a man who makes them laugh and men prefer
women who laugh at their jokes. Mickes and team wanted to find out if there was
some substance behind the stereotype i.e. are men actually funnier than women
or are they simply perceived as such?
In the first of two studies, men and women were asked to
write funny captions to accompany cartoon images from The New Yorker. The
researchers then asked a group of raters to evaluate how funny the captions
were, without knowing whether they were written by a man or a woman. Both male
and female raters judged captions written by men to be funnier. Males showed an
even stronger preference for captions written by males, indicating a uniquely
strong appreciation of male humor by male raters.
In the second study, men and women were shown the
funniest and least funny captions from the first experiment and were told
whether it was written by a man or a woman. On a memory test, they were asked
to remember whether a man or a woman had written the funny captions. Overall,
funny captions were remembered better, and the funnier the caption the more
likely the raters were to remember the gender of their author. Interestingly,
there was also a humor-based recall bias: individuals of both genders tended to
misattribute humorous captions to male writers and the non-humourous captions
to female writers.
The authors conclude: "Our findings suggest that
men's view that men are funnier could be a result of their actually finding the
humor they produce funnier, as well as their biased recall of funny things as
having sprung from men's minds. Women laughing more at men, when the gender is
known, may be largely due not to superior humor, but to more social influences,
which are known to impact laughter."
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