Both men and women are more attracted to a person with this quality.
Being funny is a sign of a higher IQ: both higher general intelligence and higher verbal intelligence.
Making people laugh is also linked to greater dating success, with both men and women more attracted to people who are funny.
However, women are more discerning about humour and react to it more strongly.
Men, meanwhile, tend to focus on producing jokes, often to impress women.”
The study’s authors write:
“Humor is not just a reliable intelligence-indicator; it may be one of the most important traits for humans seeking mates.
Of course, mate attraction is not the only function of humor.
Humor can also be used in competing for status with same-sex rivals, reducing social tensions, and other adaptive functions.”
The study involved 400 young people who were given intelligence tests and asked about their dating history.
They were then handed New Yorker cartoons with the caption deleted and asked to come up with their own.
The results showed that, unsurprisingly, verbal intelligence was strongly related to being funny.
However, participants found it difficult to produce strong captions, with most rated as not funny at all.
This shows how difficult jokes are — especially in the medium of New Yorker captions.
Other studies have also found links between intelligence and humour.
In this study, men were especially focused on trying to write funny captions and theirs were rated more highly, the authors write:
“Men were funnier than women on average and produced a larger number of captions, consistent with the sexual signaling hypothesis in which men try (unconsciously) to signal their mate quality through their humor ability, and women are more responsive to and discriminating about humor.”
Related
- 10 Lifestyle Strategies That Will Optimise Your IQ (P)
- 12 Hidden Factors That Are Secretly Lowering Your IQ (P)
The study was published in the journal Intelligence (Greengross & Miller, 2011).
