A new study by researchers of the University of California says men appear to be slightly funnier than women mostly in the opinion of their male counterparts.
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“The differences we find between men's and women's ability to be funny are so small that they can't account of the strength of the belief in the stereotype," said co-author Laura Mickes.
Researchers asked 32 male and female college students to write funny captions for a blank New Yorker cartoon. Some 34 male and 47 female students then ranked the captions without knowing the gender of the writers.
According to the results published in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, on a 0-5 scaling system men got 0.11 point higher score than women.
Despite men's slightly higher rank, 90 percent of male and female study participants believed men were funnier than women.
Men liked captions written by other men while female raters gave 0.6 point more to male writers and male raters awarded male writers' captions 0.16 point higher.
“There is some shred of truth to the received wisdom about men being funnier, but it does not come close to explaining how much funnier they think they are,” Mickes said. “The stereotype that males are funnier than females has always puzzled me, because in my experience, and my intuition was that, we are equally funny. I know I am.”
“Even more surprising, though, is that it was pretty much just other males who found males funnier,” she added.
Researchers didn't find out the reason why men's writings were a bit funnier but they suggested future investigations might find an answer to the question.
“I think the results do suggest that our thinking that men are much funnier makes us remember them as having been funnier,” said Mickes. “Lots of stereotypes can work that way. We are conducting follow up experiments in which we are measuring more aspects of why men do appear to have some humor advantage. For example, do they try harder, more often, in more contexts?”
