Würzburg (epd). Men seem to have fewer problems with man-hating jokes than women with misogynistic ones. This is the result of a new study by psychologists from the Universities of Würzburg and Kaiserslautern-Landau, as the universities announced on Wednesday. While women perceive jokes at the expense of their sex as a threat, this effect does not show up in men – not even when the jokes are told by women, explained the Würzburg psychologist Silvana Weber. She led the study together with Sven Kachel from the University of Kaiserslautern-Landau with several hundred subjects.
In the first round, the 198 participants, 74 of whom were women, were told 20 jokes from five categories. The categories included neutral, misogynistic, and misogynistic jokes. “This confirmed our hypothesis that women generally find jokes less funny than men,” Weber said. They found derogatory jokes about women particularly unfunny. Women also rated jokes that discriminated against women as more discriminatory if they were told by a male speaker.
Conversely, this was not the case for male study participants. In a further study round with 226 male participants only, the psychologists also wanted to know whether men saw their masculinity threatened by jokes that despised men. But neither the gender of the narrator nor the content of the joke had an impact on the subjects’ response.
Accordingly, men did not react to gender-discriminatory humor “in the same way” as women. According to Weber, one explanation for the observed difference could be that men generally have a higher status and greater power in society and therefore do not see their status threatened by a joke.