Prove is a funny word though, isn't it? What does it actually mean to prove something? Does it mean to, you know, confirm truth? Because then in that case I don't think this study published in the journal Psychonomic Bulletin and Review actually says what link-bate headlines like the one above and similar ones on every other website in the world today think it means. And what is science anyway? Serious question. I'd consider it a big personal favor if someone could leave the answer to that in the comments below.
Scientific American, a site I always read and didn't just go to because I saw this non-story linked elsewhere, has a summary of this completely racist study, which is great because no fucking way was I actually going to read something called the Psychonomic Bulletin and Review. "In a 2007 Vanity Fair article Christopher Hitchens asked: Why are men, taken on average and as a whole, funnier than women?" Because Christopher Hitchens is a humorless prick, we all decided was the answer to that one a while ago, I think.
"Well a recent study finds that men might have a tiny edge over women in producing humor but the gap is too small to account for the stereotype," so in other words, we didn't find shit, but we went through all this work, so here you go anyway. Psychologists are kind of like bloggers in that regard. Usually doesn't amount to anything actually usable, but, well, we sort of tried, so might as well throw what we came up with up against the wall there and hope someone falls for it.
"Scientists had 16 male and 16 female subjects write funny captions for 20 New Yorker magazine cartoons in 45 minutes. Then the captions were rated by a different group of 34 male and 47 female subjects. Men’s captions rated higher on average than women’s captions. But only by a mere 0.11 points out of perfect score of 5.0."
Oh. OK. There's your problem right there. They were testing for humor by using an ability to fill out New Yorker cartoon caption as criteria. Are we sure that sort of data might not have been better spent on figuring out where all the retired English professors who never figured out how to use the internet live? Using that shit as a means to seek out humor-patterns is like testing to see who's better at picking up heavy objects, men or women, by asking them to fart into a paper bag. I declare this study, and therefor all of science, bullshit. And if it helps you to think of this whole thing as funnier by imagining me writing it lying down on a shrink's couch talking to a dog on a desert island, then you're probably a woman New Yorker reader and you have no idea what you're talking about. That's science.
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9 comments:
how do you explain this shitty site then?
- what someone should've posted. come on you people.
Here is another write up on this:
http://ucsdnews.ucsd.edu/newsrel/soc/20111019HumorTest.asp
True to the conventional wisdom, men did better than women, but not by much: Male writers earned an average 0.11 more points than female writers. But what's even more interesting, the researchers say, and what runs contrary to the standard explanations of why men might be funnier, is that men did better with other men: Female raters allocated only an average 0.06 more points to the male writers, while the male raters gave them a significantly higher average of 0.16 more points.
...
As expected, funny captions were remembered better than unfunny ones. The authors of funny captions were remembered better too. But humor was more often misremembered "as having sprung from men's minds," the researchers write. And, even more telling, Mickes said, when the study participants were guessing at authors' gender, unfunny captions were more often misattributed to women and funny captions were more often misattributed to men.
It seems to conflict with their hypothesis that the study was over-saturated with female responders. Clearly, they were generally not aware when they were reading funny captions. In my scientific opinion as a scientist, I consider all of this data invalid unless they excluded people who think Jay Leno is funny, with a standard deviation of Tyler Perry. Also, sociology isn't science. Those clowns don't even have beakers.
That said, I also don't think women are funny, but scientists of either gender know even less about being funny than the average woman. Obvi, I am the exception to both of these rules. Like a double negative and shit.
@lemmy: so basically, men are racist against women. no shocker there.
@fraiche: haha, women can't do science. that's so cute of you to say.
it's sexism you a holes, not racism
come on
Anonymous is definitely a woman
anti semitic against humor.
Yeah, but women really aren't funny so someone give me a research grant. Another case of librul science run wild.
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