Have you ever found yourself in an argument about who is funnier, men or women? Science has come forward with an answer for you: men are funnier, but only barely, and mostly to other men.
A new study from the University of California, San Diego, used cartoons to test a group of 16 men and 16 women. Each participant wrote captions for 20 cartoons from The New Yorker, under the instruction to be as funny as possible. The captions and cartoons were shown to a group of 34 men and 47 women who selected the funniest ones. The captions were then eliminated in a five round single-elimination tournament, with higher scores awarded to the lines that made it the furthest.
If guys think their hilarious jokes are winning over the ladies, this study shows they might be mistaken: the ones who found men the funniest were other men. The differential between men's captions being the favourites over women's was .16, while women preferred the men's captions with a smaller differential of .06.
"Sad for the guys who think that by being funny they will impress the ladies, but really just impress other men who want to impress the ladies," said Nicholas Christenfeld, one of the study's authors and a UC San Diego professor of psychology.
The study also found that social bias influences our expectations of who is funny. More of the funny captions were attributed to men. When a second experiment was conducted, more participants remembered (or misremembered) funniest captions' authors being men.
The study's authors theorized that men are funnier, and are perceived as funnier, partially because they try harder at humour. The cartoon editor of The New Yorker has observed this of the publication's caption contests: in 32 contests, 22 men and 10 women had won. The 22 men entered an average of 70.22 contests, while the women averaged 6.4 entries. Four of them won on their first try.
In a final telling finding of the study, when men were asked to predict their performance in terms of how they would score in the competition, they predicted an average of 2.3, while women predicted 1.5. The researchers succinctly summed up their observations of this phenomenon:
"Male confidence, in this domain at least, does seem to outstrip male competence."
(Reuters Photo)
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