Abstract: The debate about whether women can be as funny as men pervades the popular press, and research has sometimes supported the stereotype that men are funnier (Mickes et al. 2011). The goal of the present research was to determine whether this gender difference can be explained by differences in beliefs about one’s capability for humor (“humor self-efficacy”). Male and female U.S. undergraduates (n = 64) generated captions for 20 cartoons and rated their own humor self-efficacy. Subsequently, an independent sample of 370 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) users evaluated these captions in a knockout-style tournament in which pairs of captions were presented with each of the cartoons. Each participant was randomly assigned to evaluate captions which were authored by men and women selected to be either low or high in humor self-efficacy. In the initial round of the tournament, each caption was authored by a man and a woman matched for comparable levels of self-identified humor self-efficacy. In subsequent rounds, the remaining captions were paired randomly. MTurk users, unaware of the captioners’ gender, selected the captions of men as funnier only under the low self-efficacy condition and those of women as funnier under the high self-efficacy condition. These data suggest that self-efficacy may be a critical determinant of the successful performance of humor. When people say that women are not funny, they may be relying on an unfounded stereotype. We discuss how this stereotype may negatively affect perceptions of women in the workplace and other settings.
Keywords: Humor Cartoons Human sex differences Sex roles Stereotyped attitudes Sex role attitudes
Men Are Funnier than Women under a Condition of Low Self-Efficacy but Women Are Funnier than Men under a Condition of High Self-Efficacy. Tracy L. Caldwell, Paulina Wojtach. Sex Roles, December 9 2019. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-019-01109-w
Abstract: The debate about whether women can be as funny as men pervades the popular press, and research has sometimes supported the stereotype that men are funnier (Mickes et al. 2011). The goal of the present research was to determine whether this gender difference can be explained by differences in beliefs about one’s capability for humor (“humor self-efficacy”). Male and female U.S. undergraduates (n = 64) generated captions for 20 cartoons and rated their own humor self-efficacy. Subsequently, an independent sample of 370 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) users evaluated these captions in a knockout-style tournament in which pairs of captions were presented with each of the cartoons. Each participant was randomly assigned to evaluate captions which were authored by men and women selected to be either low or high in humor self-efficacy. In the initial round of the tournament, each caption was authored by a man and a woman matched for comparable levels of self-identified humor self-efficacy. In subsequent rounds, the remaining captions were paired randomly. MTurk users, unaware of the captioners’ gender, selected the captions of men as funnier only under the low self-efficacy condition and those of women as funnier under the high self-efficacy condition. These data suggest that self-efficacy may be a critical determinant of the successful performance of humor. When people say that women are not funny, they may be relying on an unfounded stereotype. We discuss how this stereotype may negatively affect perceptions of women in the workplace and other settings.
Keywords: Humor Cartoons Human sex differences Sex roles Stereotyped attitudes Sex role attitudes
Men Are Funnier than Women under a Condition of Low Self-Efficacy but Women Are Funnier than Men under a Condition of High Self-Efficacy. Tracy L. Caldwell, Paulina Wojtach. Sex Roles, December 9 2019. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-019-01109-w
Abstract: The debate about whether women can be as funny as men pervades the popular press, and research has sometimes supported the stereotype that men are funnier (Mickes et al. 2011). The goal of the present research was to determine whether this gender difference can be explained by differences in beliefs about one’s capability for humor (“humor self-efficacy”). Male and female U.S. undergraduates (n = 64) generated captions for 20 cartoons and rated their own humor self-efficacy. Subsequently, an independent sample of 370 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) users evaluated these captions in a knockout-style tournament in which pairs of captions were presented with each of the cartoons. Each participant was randomly assigned to evaluate captions which were authored by men and women selected to be either low or high in humor self-efficacy. In the initial round of the tournament, each caption was authored by a man and a woman matched for comparable levels of self-identified humor self-efficacy. In subsequent rounds, the remaining captions were paired randomly. MTurk users, unaware of the captioners’ gender, selected the captions of men as funnier only under the low self-efficacy condition and those of women as funnier under the high self-efficacy condition. These data suggest that self-efficacy may be a critical determinant of the successful performance of humor. When people say that women are not funny, they may be relying on an unfounded stereotype. We discuss how this stereotype may negatively affect perceptions of women in the workplace and other settings.
Keywords: Humor Cartoons Human sex differences Sex roles Stereotyped attitudes Sex role attitudes
Men Are Funnier than Women under a Condition of Low Self-Efficacy but Women Are Funnier than Men under a Condition of High Self-Efficacy. Tracy L. Caldwell, Paulina Wojtach. Sex Roles, December 9 2019. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11199-019-01109-w
Abstract: The debate about whether women can be as funny as men pervades the popular press, and research has sometimes supported the stereotype that men are funnier (Mickes et al. 2011). The goal of the present research was to determine whether this gender difference can be explained by differences in beliefs about one’s capability for humor (“humor self-efficacy”). Male and female U.S. undergraduates (n = 64) generated captions for 20 cartoons and rated their own humor self-efficacy. Subsequently, an independent sample of 370 Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) users evaluated these captions in a knockout-style tournament in which pairs of captions were presented with each of the cartoons. Each participant was randomly assigned to evaluate captions which were authored by men and women selected to be either low or high in humor self-efficacy. In the initial round of the tournament, each caption was authored by a man and a woman matched for comparable levels of self-identified humor self-efficacy. In subsequent rounds, the remaining captions were paired randomly. MTurk users, unaware of the captioners’ gender, selected the captions of men as funnier only under the low self-efficacy condition and those of women as funnier under the high self-efficacy condition. These data suggest that self-efficacy may be a critical determinant of the successful performance of humor. When people say that women are not funny, they may be relying on an unfounded stereotype. We discuss how this stereotype may negatively affect perceptions of women in the workplace and other settings.
Keywords: Humor Cartoons Human sex differences Sex roles Stereotyped attitudes Sex role attitudes
Discussion
In replication of findings by Mickes et al. (2011) and
Greengross and Miller (2011), but contrary to those by
Howrigan and MacDonald (2008), our participants found
men to be, on average, more skilled at captioning New
Yorker cartoons than women. This difference was qualified,
as hypothesized, by the humor self-efficacy of the captioner;
male captioners were funnier in the low self-efficacy condition
and female captioners were funnier in the high self-efficacy
condition. Participants’ response to the question, “Who is funnier?,”
which can be interpreted as an implicit measure of
whether they endorse the stereotype that women are not funny,
varied by sample: The most frequent answer among
captioners in Phase 1, whose participants were all undergraduates, was
“neither” (42.2%), followed by “men” (38.2%),
then women (“19.6%”). This pattern was the same for men
and women. Those who rated the captions in Phase 2 were a
more age-diverse sample of MTurk users, and their answers
were “men” (44.7%), followed by “neither” (37.9%), then
“women” (17.3%) and these responses were heavily influenced by participants’
gender, such that those who responded
that men are funnier were overwhelmingly male, whereas
those who said women were funnier were overwhelmingly
female. However, contrary to Mickes et al.’s (2011) findings,
raters’self-reported preference for men’s humor did not cause
them to show a gendered preference for men’s humor greater
than that of women. In other words, although men (but not
women) told us that men are funnier, their preferences for
men’s humor was no greater than that of women, and it was
not in evidence when rating the captions of women who were
higher in self-efficacy.
We anticipated that men’s superiority at captioning New
Yorker cartoons would lessen under conditions of high self-efficacy
on the basis that the male and female captioners in
Mickes et al.’s (2011) study differed in their self-reported self-confidence.
We argue that this gender difference in self-confidence could
also account for the gender differences in
humor observed in other studies (Greengross and Miller 2011;
Howrigan and MacDonald 2008). When women internalize a
culture’s prescriptions against using humor, they chronically
operate under conditions of low self-efficacy. Our data suggest
that men and women are matched in their ability to perform
humor, but that their self-beliefs and the contexts that prime
these self-beliefs may influence its skilled performance.
Consider a compelling example of this reasoning in research
by Hull et al. (2016): Their participants were asked to produce
humor under one of two instructional cues, to either be funny
or to be catchy. All participants performed better when told to
be catchy, but women outperformed men when told to be
funny. Context mattered and confidence may be key. Also
consider research by Hooper et al. (2016), in which they asked
undergraduates from Britain, Canada, and Australia to rate
captions submitted to the New Yorker’s captioning contest by
men and women wishing to test their comic mettle. There
were no differences in the rated funniness of the captions,
except in Britain, where women’s captions were favored over
men’s. Their data show that when women have the confidence
to self-select into a captioning task, they perform at least
equally as well as men in some cultural contexts and better
in others for the same jokes.
The goal of the present study was to investigate whether
one could create a circumstance under which women could be
capable of performing humor nearly as well as men. The answer,
surprisingly, was that under conditions of high self-efficacy,
women were even more capable than men, a finding that
is “surprising” in light of the ubiquity of messages prohibiting
women’s performance of humor, including this comment on
the YouTube trailer for the all-female Ghostbusters reboot
(Sony Pictures Entertainment 2016): “Ok so I read the description
and I noticed something strange, it says ‘rebooted
with a new cast of hilarious characters’....Did these hilarious
character just not make it into the final movie or did I miss
something?” It could be easy to dismiss this kind of prejudice,
given that it is directed to four superstar comics whose careers
have fared quite well in spite of detractors. However, there are
contexts in which prejudice against women’s humor can be
more widely consequential. For example, Decker and
Rotondo (2001) found, in the workplace, that women who
used negative humor (sexual and offensive humor) were
judged as being less effective leaders than men who used the
same kind of humor and that this finding emerged even when
controlling for the gender of the respondent. When the humor
was positive, on the other hand, women were rated higher on
relationship behaviors and effectiveness than men. Their data
suggest that both men and women hold implicit beliefs about
humor and gender roles and that women’s financial well-being
is at greater risk than men’s when they use sexual and offensive humor.
Another place in which humor and gender are performed
with some risk is in romantic attraction. In the context of
heterosexual attraction, when it comes to humor, men have
indicated they prefer women who will laugh at their jokes to
those who will produce their own humor (Bressler et al. 2006;
Hone et al. 2015). Other research indicates that a woman’s use
of humor is, at best, irrelevant to her potential mate value (i.e.,
when given the choice between a woman who uses humor to
one who does not, they show no clear preference; Bressler and
Balshine 2006; Wilbur and Campbell 2011) and at worst, it
makes women less attractive (Lundy et al. 1998). Women’s
use of humor, then, may be the basis for rejection at the box
office, in the workplace, and in the dating context.
To be clear, there are just as many studies demonstrating
that men and women do not differ in their interest in humorous
partners in the context of romantic relationships (i.e., not all
men find humor unattractive; Buss 1988; DiDonato et al.
2013; Feingold 1992; Kenrick et al. 1990; Treger et al.
2013). Likewise, there are movie trailers starring all-female
casts of comics that are not trolled hard. For example, whereas
Sony Pictures Entertainment’s (2016) official Ghostbusters
trailer has nearly 300,000 YouTube comments, largely negative, Universal Pictures’s (2011) official Bridesmaids trailer
has under 1000. Perhaps the critical difference is that
Ghostbusters treads on hallowed male comics’ ground (the
original starred comedy darlings Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd,
and Harold Ramis) and Bridesmaids is a “chick flick.” Similar
hallowed ground was encroached upon in the newest take on
the comedy-heist “Oceans” series, Ocean 8, starring an allfemale cast,
whose YouTube trailer (Warner Bros. Pictures
2018) comments include, “Oh great, another all-female reboot,
‘cause Ghostbusters turned out great” and “Coming
soon: No Country for Old Women.” These examples suggest
that the answer to the question “Should women use humor?”
is: “Sure, as long as it is performed in qualitatively distinct
contexts from which men perform it.” Granted, these comments represent
the sentiments of a highly self-selected sample, thus, in future
research, one might explore just how representative
they are. Recall, however, that men’s selfprofessed preference for men’s over women’s humor was
not matched, in our sample of raters, with a measured preference for
men’s cartoon captions greater than that of women’s
cartoon captions. We take these data as preliminary evidence
that gender bias shaped men’s stated preferences.
Limitations
Overall, our data would seem to specify that the circumstance
under which men are likely to “out-humor” women is when
women’s self-efficacy is low. One shortcoming of our study is
that we cannot determine the provenance of our captioners’
self-efficacy: Did we create experimental contexts that caused
differences in humor self-efficacy or were these differences
pre-existing? Results from the caption-generation phase indicated we
were not able to demonstrate, at the level of the entire
sample, that we had successfully manipulated self-efficacy, so
we “cherry-picked” our captioners to create quasiexperimental
conditions of low and high self-efficacy, to determine if differences
in captioners’ self-efficacy were detectable by an independent
sample of raters. The quasiexperimental nature of our study makes it difficult to rule
out raw humor talent as a third variable that could simultaneously
explain captioners’ self-efficacy and their humorousness. That said,
this third variable explanation cannot explain
why men were perceived as funnier in the low self-efficacy
condition and women as funnier in the high self-efficacy condition; if
raw talent were the cause of captioners’self-efficacy
ratings and their humorousness, then it should have had the
effect of equalizing humor ability across gender. Nevertheless,
if our paradigm were to be used again, the manipulation of
self-efficacy would need to be strengthened to determine its
causality.
It is possible that we did in fact successfully manipulate
self-efficacy but that our assessment of it was not sensitive
enough. Bandura (1977) recommends a microanalytic assessment strategy
in which one assesses self-beliefs about a
targeted and objective behavioral outcome in a particular domain (e.g.,
“How confident are you that you can correctly
answer seven of these ten questions about global climate
change?”). Our assessment of humor self-efficacy consisted
of asking participants “How funny do you think others will
find your cartoon captions?” In hindsight, our question may
not have assessed self-beliefs so much as it did their beliefs
about others’ perceptions of their humor. An individual can
simultaneously be very confident that she can crack jokes that
she will find hilarious while recognizing that the average person
might not appreciate her attempts at humor. Moreover, our
question does not ask them about a behavioral outcome that
can be objectively measured. This is due in part to the subjectivity
of humor. Nevertheless, a rephrasing that comes closer
to Bandura’s original recommendation is: “How confident are
you that you can write at least three [or four or five, etc.]
captions that others with a similar sense of humor might find
funny?” A better assessment of self-efficacy is critical for
determining its role in explaining gender differences in humorous performance.
In short, participants within each of our quasi-experimental
conditions of the captioning phase shared something in common that
led to differences in their humorous performance.
We believe that self-efficacy was what caused variations in
their humorous performance, but we cannot completely rule
out raw talent as a third variable. A more effective manipulation
and assessment of self-efficacy is warranted.
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