interesting headline i read today — https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theatlantic.com/amp/article/416559/
the study's results are definitely very damning.
there's much, much, much more to it. some evo psych woo woo thrown into the mix, but the rest, i think, is worth reading.
this in particular got me like a stab in the stomach.
this too, i think, cuts to the heart of the problem.
ugh. no wonder my track record with men is so bad.
anyway, your thoughts?
the study's results are definitely very damning.
Mickes realized that university students didn't seem to welcome, or even notice, the wit of many of her female colleagues. She's not the only one. A recent graphic made by Ben Schmidt, an assistant professor of history at Northeastern University, analyzed the words used to describe male and female professors across 14 million reviews on RateMyProfessor.com. In every single discipline, male professors were far more likely than female ones to be described as funny.
"I thought, 'maybe I'm not that funny,'" Mickes said. "But people say I'm funny. I have a great time with my female friends."
In 2012, Mickes decided to see whether her student had a point. (Or rather, "I decided to redirect my anger into something productive," as she described it.)
A common way scientists measure funniness is by making undergrads—the typical guinea pigs for social-science research—play a version of The New Yorker cartoon-caption contest. For her study, Mickes asked 32 students to write captions for 20 New Yorker cartoons. The men were "pretty excited about the task," but the women were more reluctant. "There was one female subject who came in, looked horrified and said, 'Uh, but I'm not funny,'" she recalled.
After the students finished writing their quips, a new set of participants rated the captions. They found the men's punch-lines to be ever-so-slightly more clever—about .11 points more on a five-point scale.
Mickes's study revealed another interesting difference: Men wrote some of the best jokes, but they also used more profanity and sexual humor, and those jokes weren't rated very funny. If men were truly the funnier sex, though, wouldn't they be more consistently funny?
In a later experiment, Mickes gave both male and female participants a list of random words, such as "beef jerky" and "water slide," and asked them to write paragraphs using the words. Without prompting, the men wrote funny paragraphs. The women's paragraphs were more creative and better-written, but they weren't funny. However, a surprising thing happened when Mickes explicitly told the participants to try to be funny in their paragraphs: Both genders used humor, and in equal measure.
Men are willing to take more risks [in humor], and they also fail more miserably," Gil Greengross, an evolutionary psychologist with Aberystwyth University in Wales and author of the 2011 study. But for the man, "it's worth it. If you fail and you're not funny, you lost maybe a few minutes. But if the person laughs, the benefit can be huge."
Men make so many joke-attempts, in fact, they are assumed to be funnier—even when they're not. After they had finished captioning, the students in Mickes's study filled out a questionnaire about how funny they thought others would find their captions, and also whether they thought men or women were the funnier sex in general. Male participants said that, on a scale from one to five, their cartoons were an average of 2.3 in funniness. The women gave themselves a 1.5. Even worse, 89 percent of the women and 94 percent of men responded that men, in general, are funnier.
In a follow-up experiment, Mickes asked a new set of participants to read the captions generated by the first group and guess the gender of the writer. Both men and women misattributed the funnier captions to male writers.
there's much, much, much more to it. some evo psych woo woo thrown into the mix, but the rest, i think, is worth reading.
this in particular got me like a stab in the stomach.
In study later that year, Bressler and Balshine again found that, when considering imaginary interactions with people of the opposite sex, women said they wanted men who could make them laugh. Men said it was much more important that a woman enjoy his jokes.
Liana Hone, a psychology postdoc at the University of Missouri, came to a similar conclusion in a study earlier this year: "Men prefer women who are receptive to their humor, whereas women prefer men who produce humor." Hone gave her study participants an imaginary budget of $5 to "spend" on a trait they'd want in their sexual partners—either a knack for telling jokes or an ability to appreciate them. The more they "spent" on each trait, the more their partner would embody that characteristic. Women, she found, would spend just $1.91 on a mate who laughs at their jokes, but men would spend $3.03 on one.
this too, i think, cuts to the heart of the problem.
In another dating-style study in 1998, about 100 college students were shown photos of people of the opposite sex along with transcripts of interviews supposedly conducted with those individuals. In the interviews, the photo subjects came off as either funny or bland. For the women, a man's use of humor in the interview increased his desirability. The women's use of humor, meanwhile, didn't make the men want to date them more—it actually made them slightly less alluring. That's right: The men found the pretty, unfunny women more desirable than equally pretty ones who also happened to be funny.
It's possible that men are indifferent to their partners' funniness precisely because funny women are smarter. There's some evidence that men are less attracted to women who are smarter than they are. In a study out this month in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, when men were introduced to women they were told had outperformed them on an intelligence test, they rated the woman as less attractive and were less likely to say they wanted to date her.
ugh. no wonder my track record with men is so bad.
anyway, your thoughts?
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