Humor ability reveals intelligence, predicts mating success, and is higher in males
Research highlights
► Test if a humor is an intelligence indicator that translates into mating success. ► On average, males were funnier than women. ► Humor mediates the effect of intelligence on mating success for both sexes.
Introduction
Humor is an evolutionary enigma: people across cultures enjoy it with smiling, laughing, and mirth, and socially value those who produce it (Apte, 1985), yet humor production seems to yield no survival benefit, and humor's ancestral origins and adaptive functions have been hotly debated since Darwin (Darwin, 1872, Gervais and Wilson, 2005).
Sexual selection offers one possible explanation for humor's origins, functions, correlates, and social attractiveness (Bressler, Martin, & Balshine, 2006). According to the theory of mental fitness indicators (Miller, 2000, Miller, 2007), some human capacities such as language, creativity, art, music, altruism, and humor evolved at least partly through mutual mate choice for ‘good genes’ and ‘good parent’ traits. In this view, a good sense of humor is sexually attractive because it is a hard-to-fake signal of intelligence, creativity, mental health, and other traits desired by both sexes, consciously or not. Also, sex differences in reproductive strategies may explain why females value humor production ability more in mates (Lundy, Tan, & Cunningham, 1998), why females laugh and smile more during conversations, especially in response to humor produced by the opposite sex (Provine, 2000), and why women tend to like a man who will make them laugh, while men want a woman who will laugh at their humor (Bressler et al., 2006). Further, since mental fitness indicators such as humor ability may reveal general genetic quality (low mutation load), such cognitive abilities should remain at least moderately heritable despite generations of selection in favor of maximum values (Miller, 2007), and this may explain the observed heritability of humor styles and humor production ability (Vernon, Martin, Schermer, & Mackie, 2008).
Humor, intelligence, and mating success may have especially important relationships, which this paper investigates. Intelligence has been much better studied than humor as a mental fitness indicator: general intelligence is one of the most sexually desirable traits for both sexes (Buss, 1989), is highly heritable (Plomin & Spinath, 2004), and is correlated with many fitness-related traits such as physical health and longevity (Gottfredson & Deary, 2004), body symmetry (Banks, Batchelor, & McDaniel, 2010), physical attractiveness (Langlois et al., 2000) and semen quality (Arden, Gottfredson, Miller, & Pierce, 2008).
If humor production ability is an honest indicator of intelligence, humor production ability should positively correlate with intelligence. There is some evidence that a good sense of humor is associated with verbal creativity (Kaufman et al., 2008, O'Quin and Derks, 1997) and intelligence (Feingold and Mazzella, 1993, Howrigan and MacDonald, 2008). For example, Feingold and Mazzella (1991) studied verbal intelligence and “humor reasoning ability” in three samples (36 Harvard graduate students, 59 psychology undergraduates from City University of New York, and 52 volunteers from Central Park in New York; total N = 147), and found moderate correlations (r = 0.31–0.52) between the Vocabulary scale of the Multi-Aptitude Test and rater-judged humor production tasks, such as writing funny captions to cartoons stripped of their captions and writing a repartee to an absurd question,
Howrigan and MacDonald (2008) found correlations of 0.12–0.23 between general intelligence, as measured by the Raven's Advanced Progressive Matrices, and judge-rated humor production tasks that included humor responses to funny emails, mock descriptions of stereotyped characters and funny drawings, in a sample of 185 southern California college students.
This study aims to investigate further the relationship between humor and intelligence in the light of sexual selection theory. We can make several predictions if the human capacity for producing verbal humor evolved at least partly through mutual mate choice as a mental fitness indicator, and if male variance in reproductive success was somewhat higher:
- (1)
General intelligence should predict humor ability, and verbal intelligence especially should predict verbal humor ability;
- (2)
Humor ability should predict mating success, such as lifetime number of sexual partners, even if it does not predict reproductive success given modern contraception;
- (3)
Given that females show stronger preferences for humor ability than males do, humor production ability should be higher in males on average, even if there are no sex differences in intelligence (just as males show higher average height due to stronger female preferences for height, even if there are no sex differences in average health, which is a closer proxy for genetic quality).
To test these hypotheses, we administered measures of intelligence, humor ability, and mating success to a moderately large sample of university students.
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were 400 students (200 males and 200 females) enrolled in psychology courses at the University of New Mexico (UNM). Average age was 20.6 years (+/−4.7, range 18–57). Participants' self-reported ethnicity was 58% White, 29% Hispanic, 5% Asian-American, 4% American Indian, 3% African American, and 2% other. UNM is a large state university with low entrance requirements, and many minority, nontraditional, mature, and first-generation students. Thus, UNM students show high variance (and
Correlations among humor, mating and intelligence
Table 2 shows the raw bivariate correlations (for males and females separately) among the two intelligence measures (MAB vocabulary score and Raven's abstract reasoning score), humor ability (rated caption average), mating success, and age. In all analyses there were no raters' sex differences.
Consistent with prediction 1, both intelligence measures predicted humor ability, for both males and females, all at p < 0.001. For males, humor ability was correlated r = 0.44 with MAB vocabulary and r = 0.27
Discussion
This study confirmed three predictions derived from a sexual selection model of humor (Miller, 2000): intelligence predicts humor ability, humor ability predicts mating success, and males show higher average humor ability. Further, structural equation models showed that humor ability strongly mediates the positive effects of intelligence on mating success, suggesting that intelligence may be sexually attractive mainly insofar as it is manifest through verbal humor. Humor is not just a reliable
Acknowledgements
We thank Steve Gangestad, Rod A. Martin, James Boone, Scott Barry Kaufman and three anonymous reviewers for their useful comments and suggestions.
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