When Sugar-Coated Words Taste Dry: The Relationship between Gender, Anxiety, and Response to Irony

Abstract

This article approaches the question of mocking compliments and ironic praise from an interactional gender perspective. A statement such as “You're a real genius!” could easily be interpreted as a literal compliment, as playful humor or as an offensive insult. We investigate this thin line in the use of irony among adult men and women. The research introduces an interactional approach to irony, through the lens of gender stereotype bias. The main question concerns the impact of individual differences and gender effect on the perception and production of ironic comments. Irony Processing Task (IPT), developed by Milanowicz (2016), was applied in order to study the production and perception of ironic criticism and ironic praise in adult males and females. It is a rare case of a study measuring the ability to create irony because, unlike most of known irony research, it is not a multiple choice test where participants are given the response options. The IPT was also used to assess the asymmetry of affect (humor vs. malice) and impact of gender effect in the perception of ironic comments. Results are analyzed in relation to the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) scores. The findings reveal the interactional relationship between gender and response to irony. Male responses were consistently more ironic than female's, across all experimental conditions, and female responses varied more. Both, men and women used more irony in response to male ironic criticism but female ironic praise. Anxiety proved to be a moderate predictor of irony comprehension and willingness to use irony. Data, collected in control and two gender stereotype activation conditions, also corroborates the assumption that the detection of compliments and the detection of criticism can be moderated by the attitude activation effect. The results are interpreted within the framework of linguistic intergroup bias (LIB) and natural selection strategies.

A Short Etude on Irony in Storytelling

“…While "the sense of humor can be defined as relatively stable inter-individual differences in the tendency to react to humor and to produce humor, and a serene attitude toward life; see Ruch, 1998" (Bruntsch and Ruch, 2017), the sense of irony is rather a state than a disposition. The moderating effect of state (but not trait) anxiety on verbal reactions to ironic comments described by Milanowicz et al (2017) supports this notion.…”

“…From being a violation of code, a figure of speech that does not mean what it says, flouting the maxim of quality (Grice, 1975), through the game of pretense (Clark and Gerrig, 1984), to the sound of an echo Wilson, 1981, 1984;Kumon-Nakamura et al, 1995), and indirect negation (Giora, 1995), irony still means more than its literal words ( Milanowicz, Tarnowski and Bokus, 2017).…”

“…Following this line of thinking, if the desirable behavior of an ingroup member is interpreted on a more abstract level than negative behavior, and the process is reversed for outgroup members (Wigboldus and Douglas, 2007), it can be expected that irony, as the manifestation of a more complex and abstract mental action, should be used differently by ingroup (e.g., same-sex, same occupation, same race) than outgroup members (e.g., opposite-sex, different professional category, different cultural or racial background). Milanowicz, Tarnowski and Bokus (2017) observed the effect of gender in the use of irony. Not only did men use more irony than women, which reconfirms previous studies (Colston and Lee, 2005;Ivanko, Pexman, andOlineck, 2004, Kreuz andLink, 2004), it was also shown that in the case of a negative irony (criticism) women used more irony to a man (out-group members) than to a woman.…”

“…We are benchmarking our verbal performance against those criteria of "sameness" and "otherness." Both, children and adults adjust their communication to accommodate the social context (Milanowicz and Bokus, 2013;Milanowicz et al, 2017). "Confirming a shift from personal to social identity, women described themselves as more relational in the intergroup context than in the intragroup context ...…”

Between Science, Art, and Forgery: Latin Textual Criticism as a Case Example

“…Does irony have gender? Our research (Milanowicz, Tarnowski, Bokus, 2017) shows that although verbal "irony" is etymologically female (Polish: ironia -feminine grammatical gender), its daily application is more of a male domain. Irony is used more frequently by men than women.…”