Were humorous individuals considered more desirable relationship partners, and did the sexes respond differently to humorous individuals?.

Humorous interaction is a ubiquitous aspect of human social behavior, yet the function of humor has rarely been studied from a Darwinian perspective. One exception is Miller's theory that one's ability to produce high-quality humor functioned as a fitness indicator, and hence, humor production and appreciation have evolved as a result of sexual selection. In this study, we examined whether there are sex differences in attraction to humorous individuals, and whether using humor influences perceptions of humorists' personality traits. We experimentally manipulated how humorous two-stimulus persons were perceived to be by presenting them with autobiographical statements that were either funny or not. Participants chose which person was a more desirable partner for a romantic relationship, and which individual was more likely to have several personality traits. Only women evaluating men chose humorous people as preferred relationship partners. For both sexes, humorous individuals were seen as less intelligent and trustworthy than their nonhumorous counterparts, but as more socially adept. These results are discussed in light of sexual selection theory.

Our results suggest that humor can positively affect desirability as a relationship partner, but this effect is most likely to occur when men use humor and are evaluated by women. We found no evidence that men prefer humorous women as partners, nor that women consider humorous women more desirable partners. This limitation of the influence of humor on desirability to situations where fitness indicators are predicted to be important suggests a role for sexual selection in the evolution of humor.

Humor is not consistently associated with positive perceptions, as might be expected if there were a humor “halo effect,” such as that found with physical attractiveness. Humorous individuals were seen as more socially adept, but as less trustworthy/honest and intelligent. Indeed, given the forced-choice design, this makes the relationship findings more compelling: Women chose funny men as relationship partners despite often rating them as less honest and intelligent.

This last result conflicts with the suggestion that humor functions to signal intelligence; however, this study may not be a critical test of Miller's hypothesis. Our participants may not have used the term “intelligence” in the same way that Miller does. While Miller uses the term to refer to general intelligence, it seems possible that participants may have interpreted the term as synonymous with “scholarly” or “educated,” for example. Given the sophomoric nature of some of our humorous statements, it is not surprising that participants did not ascribe “intelligence” to our humorous individuals. However, this makes our results even more supportive of the contention that humor is attractive: Women preferred humorous men as relationship partners, even when the humor they used was unsophisticated. Additional post hoc analysis showed no relationship between humor quality (based on preratings) and favorable judgments. These nonsignificant results may be accounted for by the fact that the humor in this study showed a restricted range of quality. Examinations of the influence of different types of humor (including more erudite forms) on person perception and desirability would be a valuable addition to this research area.

Although our study supports Miller's theory that humor plays a role in mate choice, it did not support the notion that humor plays an equal role in men's and women's mate choice. Prior work suggests that men value a “good sense of humor” in prospective mates as much as women do. Our findings appear to conflict with these prior studies. There are at least three potential explanations that may resolve this conflict. First, in many of the prior studies, participants were asked to either list the traits they prefer in a partner or were asked to rank order a number of traits presented to them on a list. As both methods (rank ordering or listing) remove some information about the magnitude of preference, they render comparisons between the sexes less sensitive: While a rank-ordered preference for humor by men may not differ from that of women, the absolute importance of humor when choosing a mate may nevertheless differ between the sexes. These differences may have affected our results. For example, although paired photographs were prematched on physical attractiveness, participants may have had idiosyncratic opinions of which individual was more attractive, variance that would be expected to influence men's choices more than women's.

A second explanation is that men's and women's preferences for humorous partners may vary as a function of the anticipated costs of the relationship. Short- versus long-term mating preferences are known to vary on a number of dimensions and may do so for humor as well. Unfortunately, we do not know how our participants were interpreting our “romantic relationship partner” question in this regard.

A third explanation is that men and women may mean different things by “good sense of humor.” For example, this phrase may refer to individuals who produce high-quality humor or to those who appreciate the humor of others. Men may prefer women who signal appreciation of their humor because humor appreciation may signal sexual interest. Research has shown that when women and men engaged in natural conversation, the extent to which a woman laughed during the conversation was predictive of both her interest in dating the man and the man's interest in dating her, while men's laughter was not related to either's interest in future interaction. Very little is known about how various humor-related behaviors contribute to our classification of others' sense of humor. To our knowledge, no research has investigated whether men and women differ systematically in the extent to which they attend to these behaviors or prefer them in others. If humor has evolved as a signal of mate quality, then the failure to notice high-quality humor may have higher costs for women than for men due to women's relatively higher costs of mating. Conversely, if signals of the appreciation of humor–through laughter and smiling–have predicted sexual interest, then compared with women, men may more strongly prefer partners who are receptive to their humor due to their higher correlation between copulatory frequency and reproductive success