making sense of humour
the humour & attraction in courtship
As we approach the month of February hearts and minds
turn to one thing – Valentines Day. So I thought it would be
timely and interesting to write a column about humour and
mate selection. Choosing the person to spend the rest of
your life with is a very important decision and researchers
have been exploring this idea for quite some time.
Some research examines gender differences in mate selection – men want youth and beauty as a sign of fertility
and women want reliability and the likelihood of stable provision of support. Yes, that is a very narrow and old fashioned idea, but the research still bears out today, although
heterosexual women are increasingly looking for someone
who is caring and loving more than a stable provider. But
in amongst the good looks, the pay cheques and the functioning reproductive system is the person you’ll have to
sit across from every morning at breakfast while the caffeine is still seeping through your veins, and this is where
individual difference characteristics, like a good sense of
humour, come into play.
Adrian Furnham examined how males and females described themselves and asked them to describe their ideal
long-term, romantic partners. Funny/humourous was the
most common descriptor that males used for themselves,
and the second most common self-descriptor for females.
When describing their ideal romantic partner, being funny/
humourous came in 6th for males, but was the second most
important quality that females were looking for in a heterosexual partner following caring/loving.
There is, however, a limitation to research that is based
entirely on self-report. We have all heard a thousand iterations of ideal mate traits – smart, caring, funny, honest and
so on, so there is massive societal influence into what we
should want. It is possible that participants are compelled
to report stereotypical answer. What happens in real life
when faced with an actual potential partner? Ok, maybe
not a real life partner, but a verbal description of one. Elizabeth McGee and Mark Shevlin presented participants with
descriptive vignettes of potential opposite-sex mates but
varied the sense of humour. Some participants read a description where the person had a good sense of humour,
some read a description of a person who had an average
sense of humour and some read a description where the
person had no sense of humour. The participants then rated these imaginary people on how attractive they were.
Ratings of attractiveness were significantly higher for potential mates who were described as having a good sense
of humour. Similar to the study above, the potential partner
having a sense of humour was more important for females
than males.
Is it really more important for females to have a partner
with a sense of humour?
Recent research in social neuroscience shows that female
brains appreciate humour more than their male counterparts even in childhood. Pascal Vrticka and colleagues
presented children with humourous video clips, positive
video clips and neutral video clips while their brain activity was scanned in an MRI machine. The female brains
showed significantly more activation of the reward centre
of the brain than the male brains when viewing humourous
video clips. So well before the mate selection stage of life,
the brain is responding to humour differently for females
than for males. Note, this is just appreciation for humour
in general, the video clips were of silly animals or people
falling down, not an appreciation of people who have a
good sense of humour.
But what is having a good sense of humour anyway. Is
it someone who produces humour and makes you laugh,
or someone who gets your jokes and laughs along with
you? Nicolas Guéguen conducted a clever, real world experiment to examine if there was a dif