Humor Is Sexy is attractive to men and women — but not in the same way.
The research shows women like men who make them laugh, and men like women who laugh at their jokes.
:
Recent research suggests that while both men and women say they like a “good sense of humor” in a potential mate, they differ in what they mean by this phrase. Women tend to prefer men who make them laugh, whereas men tend to prefer women who laugh at their jokes.
Consistent with this, Robert Provine analyzed more than 3000 singles ads and found that women were more likely to describe their good humor appreciation ability whereas men were more likely to offer good humor production ability.
Gil Greengross and Geoffrey Miller found in a sample of 400 university students that general intelligence and verbal intelligence both predicted humor production ability (writing captions for cartoons), which in turn predicted lifetime number of sexual partners (a proxy of reproductive success). They found, however, that males showed higher average levels of humor production ability, which is consistent with the sexual selection perspective. From these results, Greengross argues that a sense of humor evolved at least partly through sexual selection as an intelligence indicator.
So ladies can boost their attractiveness by chuckling a bit more.
Men in the “humor” condition received phone numbers from 42.9% of the female participants and were refused 57.1% of the time. In comparison, men in the “no humor” condition were refused 84.6% of the time and were only accepted 15.4% of the time. In other words, men who were observed as the humor producers of the group were nearly three times as likely to receive a phone number than those who were observed as laughing at a friend’s joke instead.
Being Liked Is Sexy
Want to increase someone’s interest in you? Might be worthwhile to make sure they find out you’re interested in them.
As a result of the interviews, the researchers speculated that the best strategy would be to give a potential date the impression that in general you were hard to get (and therefore a scarce resource worth having) but really enthusiastic about him or her specifically. They tested this notion by using some of the same techniques… and found overwhelming evidence to support their hypothesis.
How They Make You Feel Is Sexy
Research shows we don’t really fall in love with a person — we fall in love with how we feel when we’re with them.
This is best demonstrated by the concept of emotional contagion: we’re bad at telling what made us feel a certain way, but good about making associations.
Those in the high-fear condition did show, for example, significantly more desire to kiss my confederate (one of the key questions) and wrote more romantic and sexual content into their stories. Looking at the details of these results, I found that the situation had generated, quite specifically, romantic attraction.