The attractiveness of humour types in personal advertisements: Affiliative and aggressive humour are differentially preferred in long-term versus short-term partners

Abstract

Abstract:A good sense of humour is commonly offered in written dating advertisements demonstrating that humour is an important quality to have when attracting a mate, but not all humour is the same. This study used vignettes in the style of a personal advertisement to measure the attractiveness of affiliative and aggressive humour in different relationship contexts. The results demonstrated that affiliative humour was more attractive than aggressive humour in both relationship contexts but especially for long-term relationships. The results follow the pattern expected of affiliative humour styles being more attractive for long-term relationships due to being linked to qualities that may be important in long-term relationships such as likelihood of cooperation, and aggressive humour styles not being favoured for long-term relationships due to being linked to qualities that may be detrimental in long-term relationships. A follow-up study confirmed that different humour styles were associated with different perceived personality traits. Together these findings suggest that humour may be used to indicate an individual's personality and that the attractiveness of a good sense of humour depends on both the type of humour and the type of relationship being sought.

Gendering conversational humor in advertising: an evolutionary explanation of the effects of spontaneous versus canned humor

“…While an older meta-analysis on humor in advertising did not find any gender differences (Eisend 2007), presumably because studies with different humor types were integrated in the systematic review, a more recent and larger meta-analysis concluded that women respond better to humor than men (Hornik et al 2016). However, such generalized effects need to be interpreted with caution, as individual studies clearly show that humor type is an important moderator for gender-related responses toward humor in advertising (Cowan and Little 2013;Schwarz et al 2015;Vijayalakshmi et al 2015;Weinberger et al 2017). For instance, several studies have shown that violent humor does not work well for women (Swani et al 2013;Yoon and Kim 2014).…”

The effects of relationship context and modality on ratings of funniness

“…After answering basic demographic questions concerning only age, sex, nationality, ethnicity, relationship status, and handedness, participants were asked to listen to all 32 voice clips (with each joke being spoken by 4 voices; both the masculinised and feminised versions of the male and female joke-teller) in a self-paced online questionnaire on a computer in a quiet lab setting. The manipulation check was carried out to ensure that aggressive jokes were not included as this could introduce personality associations which may interfere with the perception of voices (Cowan & Little, 2013a;Zeigler-Hill et al, 2013). Thus, participants were asked to rate the jokes on a 7 point scale (ranging from 1 'high in affiliation', to 4 'neutral', to 7 'high in aggression') to identify if any of the jokes could be classed as aggressive.…”

“…It is however likely that this is not the case for all humour styles and all contexts. Specifically, affiliative humour use is also associated with being more empathetic and supportive (Howland & Simpson, 2013) and cooperative (Cowan & Little, 2013a; Chapter 3), but aggressive humour is used and perceived very differently.…”

It’s the way he tells them (and who is listening): men’s dominance is positively correlated with their preference for jokes told by dominant-sounding men

“…Our manipulation check was conducted in order to ensure that our main analysis was not confounded by differences in humor style within the stimulus set, which has been highlighted as an important variable within previous work (Cowan and Little, 2013b). Thus, participants were asked to rate the jokes on a 7 point scale (ranging from 1 "high in affiliation', to 4 "neutral", to 7…”