How does humor production and appreciation relate to age and a male bias regarding humor?
Summary
The aim of this study was to provide insight in how humor production and humor appreciation is related to gender and a male bias regarding humor. The assumption that men could be funnier is widely shared (Howrigan & MacDonald, 2008; Greengross & Miller, 2011; Mickes et al., 2012). However, there are mixed results in the differences in humor production and appreciation and enough evidence to see if these differences could be explained by a male bias (Mickes et al., 2012; Hooper, Sharpe & Roberts, 2016; Tosun, Vaghihi & Vaid, 2018). Participants (N=163) were asked to perform a humor appreciation task were they were asked to score their appreciation on authorless cartoons from The New Yorker on a Likert-scale. After that they were asked if they thought the same cartoons were written by men of women and the question was asked if they thought males, females or equal were funnier. The next task was an humor production task to create funny captions to four cartoons. No difference was found between gender and humor production, appreciation and male bias. More people see men as funnier than women, regardless of the scores. Male bias was present among all ages. Future research could look is self-efficacy is an explanation for the male bias. It could also be interesting to look whether this bias is present among different cultures.