Ratings of and Memory for Gender Jokes

1. Dave Kohlmeyer Marquette University Midwestern Psychological Association Chicago, May, 2006 Method Materials Twelve matched gender biased jokes that could be “reversed” as in the examples below and six “neutral” jokes. Procedure In an on-line experiment, 19 males and 29 females rated 6 jokes that disparaged females, 6 jokes that disparaged males, and 6 “neutral” jokes on 5-point scales of humorousness, offensiveness, and bias. No subject rated both the against-females and against-males version of any of the jokes; all rated the neutral jokes. Following the ratings, participants were tested in a unexpected cued recall task for punch lines (“Why was the male brain cheaper?”) and other “incidental” information (“How many brains were available?”). After consultation, inter-judge agreement of recall accuracy was greater than 95%. Results Ratings of and Memory for Gender Jokes Doug Eamon, Dawn Dent, Kim Pleva, Jesse Nelson-Rowe University of Wisconsin - Whitewater Joke Ratings Humorousness. A 2 (subject sex) x 2 (joke bias) AOV revealed that females rated jokes biased against females as less humorous (M = 2.42) than the same jokes in their against-male form (M = 2.82), but little difference was found in the ratings by males (MBiased against females = 2.94 vs. MBiased against males = 2.66), F(1, 46) = 12.81, p < .001, Figure 1). Offensiveness. An AOV for ratings of offensiveness showed that females rated the jokes in their against-female form as more offensive (M = 2.37) than the same jokes in their against-male form (M = 1.74), but little difference was found in offensiveness ratings by males, (MBiased against females = 1.87 vs. MBiased against males = 1.76), F(1, 46) = 9.19, p < .01, Figure 2). Figure 1 Figure 2