Dissing Oneself versus Dissing Rivals: Effects of Status, Personality, and Sex on the Short-Term and Long-Term Attractiveness of Self-Deprecating and Other-Deprecating Humor

By Gil Greengross, G. Miller. 2008

134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This study explores the adaptive functions and design features of self-and other-deprecating humor. Sixty-four female and 32 male college students participated in a two-part study. In the first part, we examined the relationships among participant demographics, personality traits, and preferences for producing different types of humor. Men report using more other-deprecating humor than women do, and the use of other-deprecating humor decreases with age for both sexes. In the second part of the study, each participant listened to tape recordings of opposite-sex people who were described as having different levels of status, and who produced different types of humor; then participants rated each person's attractiveness as a potential short-term and long-term mate. Humor type and presenter status had no effects on short-term attractiveness, but self-deprecating humor by high-status presenters (but not low-status presenters) increased long-term attractiveness for both sexes. These results are discussed in the light of sexual selection theory and costly signaling theory.

Subfields: Gender Studies, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/31df3cff00bbcc0cbd9c55618465e185ae0a5af5

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Gender Studies

1. Yejin Choi
2. Maarten Sap
3. Gil Greengross
4. G. Miller

In Social Psychology

1. Yejin Choi
2. Noah A. Smith
3. Maarten Sap
4. Gil Greengross
5. G. Miller

Citations in the corpus

• Humor ability reveals intelligence, predicts mating success, and is higher in males. (2011, background): “Previous research shows that people are perceived as funnier if they are more physically attractive, more agreeable, or higher in status (Greengross & Miller, 2008; Lundy et al., 1998), and blind ratings eliminate such halo effects.”
• Annotators with Attitudes: How Annotator Beliefs And Identities Bias Toxic Language Detection (2021, background): “We do not consider posts that are anti-Black and AAE, since the pragmatic toxicity implications of anti-Black meaning expressed in AAE are very complex (e.g., in-group language with selfdeprecation, sarcasm, reclaimed slurs; Greengross and Miller, 2008; Croom, 2011), and are thus beyond the scope of”