Humor deserves its own special
treatment. As anyone who skims through the personal ads knows, sense of humor is
an absolutely essential quality. Everyone wants it in his or her partner, and no
one will admit to lacking it. Any time I asked men or women what qualities they
looked for, sense of humor was at or near the top of the list. Why should that
be the case? Researchers did a very interesting study that helps provide some
answers. They asked a group of women to read vignettes about various men. The
key variable that changed from story to story was the man’s sense of humor. In
some stories, the fictional man had an excellent sense of humor. In others, he
had an average one. And in still others, he had a poor sense of humor. The study
found that men with an excellent sense of humor were endowed by female readers
with all sorts of other good qualities. Women saw them as more sensitive, more
adaptable, happier, more intelligent, more masculine, and even taller. All of
these additional attributes were not because of anything in the vignette. They
were entirely the result of the man’s sense of humor. In other words, women
unconsciously use sense of humor as a proxy for many other traits, such as
creativity and intelligence. This helps explain why humor is always high on the
list of desired qualities. It is not just for that quality in and of itself but
because it acts as a signal for so many other sought-after qualities as
well.
To see how deeply this is woven into
our psyches, you only need to look at the results when the researchers took into
account a woman’s fertility. When a woman was at her peak fertility and looking
for a short-term relationship, her attraction to the man with an excellent sense
of humor spiked sharply. Men with average or below-average humor found their
ratings unchanged, which confirms that humor acts as a proxy for good genes in
general. Humor may even be worth the importance that so many of us place on it.
One study revealed that women’s humor rating of their partners significantly
predicted their general relationship satisfaction. But there remains a crucial
difference between the sexes. Studies show that men tend to be the ones who make
the jokes, and women tend to be the ones who laugh at them.
Unfortunately, none of this is the
holy grail of dating. At best, it gets you only a small way toward figuring out
what to look for in a partner. When it comes to personality, science still only
has a rudimentary understanding of why one person is attracted to
another.
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