Men Are Funnier than Women under a Condition of Low Self-Efficacy but Women Are Funnier than Men under a Condition of High Self-Efficacy

The debate about whether women can be as funny as men pervades the popular press, and research has sometimes supported the stereotype that men are funnier (Mickes et al. 2011). The goal of the present research was to determine whether this gender difference can be explained by differences in beliefs about one’s capability for humor (“humor self-efficacy”). Male and female U.S. undergraduates (n = 64) generated captions for 20 cartoons and rated...