Men Found To React More Emotionally to Humor than Women

October 14, 1999

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By William J. Cromie
Gazette Staff

Allan Filipowicz reflects on humor in the workplace. He did a study that challenges the popular belief that it improves performance.

Show a man something funny and he will perform better at a creative task. Show a woman something that’s equally funny, and there’s no improvement. Put the man and woman together and, instead of humor carrying the day, the two effects cancel each other out.

At least that’s how things turned out in a Harvard study done by Allan Filipowicz, a doctoral student in organizational behavior.

"There’s a popular but unsubstantiated belief in business that humor is good in the workplace," Filipowicz says. "It’s generally thought to increase communication, ease social interactions, increase performance, relieve stress, and improve creativity. Companies such as AT&T, DuPont, Kodak, IBM, Mobil, and Hewlett-Packard have used humor consultants to help them obtain such benefits."

But Filipowicz couldn’t find much evidence to support this idea. Some studies had been done but with mixed results. Sometimes humor helped performance, sometimes it hindered performance, often it did nothing. Also, few of the studies looked at the effect on group performance.
With help from Robert Rosenthal, a former professor of psychology, and undergraduate Angie Fischer ’98, Filipowicz recruited 32 undergraduates at Harvard, 16 males and 16 females. He showed them humorous and neutral videotapes to determine which ones they considered funny or not funny. All agreed that the most hilarious tapes were made up of clips from television’s The Cosby Show and the film Liar, Liar.

Having established agreement on what’s funny and what’s not, Filipowicz enlisted 50 more students, 25 women and 25 men. He showed pairs of them either the neutral or humorous tapes, then assigned them creative tasks. Given straws, plastic cups, craft sticks, and other materials, they had to build an "aesthetically pleasing tower" at least 20 inches high in 15 minutes.

A second task involved using the same materials to build a bridge at least 20 inches long in 15 minutes.

Each individual worked alone as well as in female-male pairs.

A Surprise Performance
Filipowicz was most interested in how the couples did, since there have been so few studies on how groups perform when tickled by humor. He was puzzled to find no effect at all. Creative performance was the same after having a good laugh or seeing a neutral video.

"I decided to work backward to try to find an explanation." Filipowicz says. "Then I was really surprised."

Males performed better after being stimulated by humor, but females did not, even though both agreed on what was funny. When they worked together, female failure to improve canceled out the better performance of males, so that the pair did no better than after watching neutral films.

The women did not react emotionally to the comedy, but the men did, Filipowicz concludes. "Females rated the tape as funny but only on a thinking, or cognitive, level; they showed no other emotional reactions," he notes. Males rated the humorous tapes as equally amusing, but said they felt more alert, active, interested, and excited after viewing them. That accounted for their better performances.

Will men and women react this way to humor all the time? Filipowicz doesn’t think so.

After getting them in a happy mood, Filipowicz asked the men and women to do creative tasks that had more than one solution. "Males definitely do better in this situation," he says. "But in less creative situations with only one right answer, as in multiple choice questions, the outcome can be different."

A study by other researchers found that both men and women with test anxiety do better on multiple-choice tests when humorous questions are included. The witticisms evidently reduce anxiety. However, in another, similar, study where test scores didn’t count, and thus anxiety was muted, men did worse when humorous questions were included. In that situation, jocularity may have caused too much emotional arousal and hindered performance.

"This explains the contradictory results of different studies that tried to assess the benefits of humor," Filipowicz believes. "The lesson to take home is that humor is useful but it must be aligned with the cognitive and emotional demands of a task to be most effective."