Men are funnier than women - just by hair’s breadth
October 20th, 2011 - 5:41 pm ICT by IANSWashington, Oct 20 (IANS) Men are funnier than women but just by a hair’s breadth, somewhat bolstering the stereotype on gender differences and humour.
“The differences we find between men’s and women’s ability to be funny are so small that they can’t account for the strength of the belief in the stereotype,” said Laura Mickes, postdoctoral researcher and study co-author at the University of California, San Diego (UCSD).
Men edged out women by 0.11 points out of a theoretically possible perfect score of 5.0, while about 90 percent of both male and female study participants agreed with the stereotype that men are funnier, the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review reports.
Male prowess at the task of being funny on command, said Nicholas Christenfeld, professor of psychology at the UCSD and study co-author, was “just at the edge of detectability” and men scored better with other men than with women, according to a California statement.
The results of two experiments that researchers conducted showed that true to conventional wisdom, men did better than women, but not by much: Male writers earned an average 0.11 more points than female writers.
The authors of funny captions were remembered better too. But humour was more often misremembered “as having sprung from men’s minds”, the researchers wrote.
And, even more telling, Mickes said, when the participants were guessing at authors’ gender, unfunny captions were more often misattributed to women and funny captions were more often misattributed to men.
It could be that men see more opportunities to take a stab at humour, said Christenfeld. It could be that they try harder or more often.
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