581 - Humor and Attraction with Dr. Paul Eastwick
Must have a sense of humor
It’s what nearly ever dating profile has, but anecdotally, it doesn’t seem like the funniest person gets all the dates. So why has this narrative dominated for so long?
Our guest, Dr. Paul Eastwick, has done landmark research on the concept of “stated versus revealed preference.” In his 2008 speed-dating research, he found that what people say they want (such as earning potential or physical attractiveness) doesn’t always match who they actually choose face-to-face.
Paul is a Professor of Psychology at UC Davis and the author of the book "Bonded by Evolution" that offers an exciting new look at the science of attraction and compatibility. He joins us this episode to give his input on some additional research about humor and attraction.
Some of the recent data on this subject revealed:
The Gender Myth in the New Data: This 2024 study by Wainwright and colleagues looked at humor in 554 speed-daters. This study addressed the old evolutionary trope that says “men perform, women appreciate,” meaning men tell the jokes and women evaluate them. But this concept did not hold up in Wainwright’s study that looked at actual behavior.
The Laughter Fallacy: Often, we assume that if our date is laughing, we’re doing a good job. But audio recordings from the Wainwright study suggest otherwise; their data shows that laughter doesn’t actually correlate with overall physical attraction. It could be signaling politeness, nervousness, etc.
Willingness to Date vs. Raw Attraction: Being a great audience doesn’t necessarily make you more attractive, but it does make someone more “willing” to date you.
Paul expands on all of these findings during the episode, and we also discuss something called the “Encryption Hypothesis,” which was proposed by anthropologists Thomas Flamson and Clark Barrett. They hypothesized that a joke acts as an encrypted message used to assess if someone shares your underlying values and worldview. Their findings showed that people who already shared background knowledge concerning the joke preferred “highly encrypted” versions of the jokes, while those without the background knowledge preferred lower encryption. This suggests that when we say we want a funny partner, we’re really looking for someone who can decrypt our specific cultural whistle.
Humorous pitfalls
A research study by psychologist Rod Martin in 2003 categorized humor into four styles, positive styles such as Affiliative Humor or inclusive banter, and negative ones like self-defeating humor where the person constantly makes themselves the punchline to gain approval. Additional follow-up studies using Martin’s framework have shown that affiliative humor is linked to a better ability to initiate relationships and higher social competence. Conversely, relying heavily on self-defeating humor is predictive of lower self-esteem, higher anxiety, and greater social rejection. All in all, tearing yourself down may temporarily put a date at ease, but you end up sacrificing the perception of competence that ends up driving romantic attraction.
Some long-term relational maintenance regarding humor:
Humor as a Repair Attempt: Using gentle, shared humor during a disagreement acts as a way to de-escalate tension. An artfully deployed inside joke can shift a couple’s focus away from a defensive position and back towards their shared connection, acting as emotional repair without necessarily requiring a heavy emotional conversation.
Biology of Bonding and Safety: When couples laugh together during intense moments, their brains release neurotransmitters that reduce the stress hormone and end up increasing a sense of psychological safety. It also boosts oxytocin, a bonding hormone that helps partners feel closer, seen, and soothed.
Long-term Satisfaction and Longevity: Relationships characterized by humor instead of bickering leads to less rancor and more tenderness over time. These relationships often are linked to better physical health outcomes and longer lives as well.
The Mutually Transformative Effect: Studies show the relationship between humor and relationship quality operates on a loop. Use of humor improves a couple’s perception of their relationship quality, and in turn, feeling satisfied in the relationship naturally promotes more laughter and playfulness.
Transcript
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Paul: When you think about humor and what it takes to be funny, many of our jokes, especially the things we find diadically funny, are rooted in a history. I don't know about you all, but when I get together with my high school friends, it's all just rehashing of old jokes. And why do we do this? It's because you're reliving the sense of shared history, and it feels really good to do that. So now, in a dating context, what does that look like? It's like a callback from an hour earlier. Circle back 45 minutes later, reference something from earlier. It shows that, 'Hey, I remember that conversation earlier. That stuck with me. I'm still thinking about you.' And it conveys, again, something truly dyadic. And I think that's something that can really click with people.
Jase: Welcome to the Multiamory Podcast. I'm Jase.
Emily: I'm Emily.
Dedeker: And I'm Dedeker.
Emily: We believe in looking to the future of relationships, not maintaining the status quo of the past.
Dedeker: Whether you're monogamous, polyamorous, swinging, casually dating, or if you just do relationships differently, we see you, and we're here for you.
Jase: On this episode of the Multiamory podcast, we're talking about humor and attraction. Are funny people hotter, or are those the people that we just friend zone? Why do we say that we're so attracted to humor when we don't actually act on it? Or do we? We're going to get into all of these questions. And while I was researching this episode, I was looking at it, and some of the research that came up was from Dr. Paul Eastwick, and Dedeker said, "Hey, what if we just had him back on the show again?"
Dedeker: We know that guy now.
Jase: We know that guy. And so joining us today is Paul Eastwick. He is a professor of psychology at UC Davis and the author of the book Bonded by Evolution that offers an exciting new look at the science of attraction and compatibility. And together with Eli Finkel, he hosts the podcast Love Factually, where they analyze rom-coms and romantic dramas from the perspective of relationship science. And they also conducted a lot of speed-dating research that are some of the ones that came up in my sources. We're going to get into all of that and more in this episode. So, Paul, thank you so much for joining us.
Paul: Thank you so much for having me back. I'm always delighted to make another appearance here.
Jase: Awesome. So basically, to give you all the background on this episode, I wanted to answer this question of why, when people are asked what traits do they find most attractive, humor is almost always at the top of that list. And I had that thought anecdotally, and then I looked up research, and yes, that shows up consistently very high up on scales of attractiveness, of attractive traits. But then I was thinking about it and I was like, but is that true? Are we actually attracted to funny people? Or do we just think we're attracted to funny people and we're actually just attracted to other traits? And so that's kind of what got me started going down this rabbit hole here. And when looking into this, one argument that I found for humor being important came from evolutionary psychology, which for those of you who listen to this show, you know that we often cast a critical gaze on evolutionary psychology because it's a field that's really fascinating, but really easy to put your own biases into to kind of project modern day cultural sensibilities of where you're living back onto all of the evolution of humans. But basically the idea here, and I'm curious, Paul, to hear your thoughts on this, is what they call the fitness indicator hypothesis.
Emily: Yeah.
Jase: So the idea here is that humor requires you to have a quick wit. And so if someone's funny, it's showing you, oh, they have good mental acuity. They're smart. They're intelligent. They're able to think laterally. They're able to come to surprising conclusions, things like that. And so therefore, humor is an indicator of attractiveness.
Paul: Maybe to some extent, but I wanna back up and actually interrogate the pretty deep underlying assumption in the evolutionary psychological take that you just described, which is that at a core level, humor, being funny, is a trait that differs from person to person. Some people have it and some people don't. And knowing that it's a trait, if you were looking for a mate, might you want a partner who has more rather than less of it? So if you come to humor with that lens, then what you start to think is, well, maybe it's associated with other traits. Maybe it signals something valuable like your intelligence or your good underlying genetics in some way, shape, or form. Maybe you don't think it's about intelligence, but it's about I can get along well in groups because I keep things cohesive among folks. That is one sort of bucket of evolutionary perspectives. And we can get into some of the early work that claimed evidence for that sort of idea. But I want to contrast that now because this is going to keep coming up, that there's a different way to think about what it means to be funny, what it means to be humorous. And it's taking place more at the level of the dyad, of the pair. So I'm doing things to make you laugh because I value you or this relationship, or I want you to value me. There are dyadic reasons that humor could be appealing as well that have nothing to do with traits. So I think there's maybe a little something behind the trait-based idea, but it's not surprising if you've ever heard me talk on a single other show that I think there's a lot behind the dyadic idea, that there's something relational baked in there.
Dedeker: Okay. So to summarize, to see if I understand, you're making the case that sure, someone who has a sense of humor, that could be an indicator of something else, right? That they can get along with people socially, that they're a desirable mate, or maybe it indicates some more ephemeral trait that would make them a good mate for reproduction. But you're making the argument that maybe humor's purpose is better suited towards maintaining a dyadic relationship as opposed to something that's make someone broadly appealing to everybody as a mate.
Paul: Yeah, exactly. And I think again, it's one of these things where our brains have been a little warped by the modern context because when you think of funny people today, I think of somebody standing on a stage with a microphone and entertaining a room because the room is all interested in listening to the funny guy or the funny woman up there on stage. But in reality, I think most of the ways we experience humor are, it's dyadic. It's like telling in-jokes with our friends, further cementing the bonds with our friends. And if we're trying to attract somebody in the first place, you're joking around with somebody cuz you're trying to construct something. So again, I think there's a role for both components, but in today's age, like, boy, is it easy to slip into the, you know, we're all out here performing. Trying to impress everybody with the best versions of ourselves.
Jase: Yeah, I think that's a great point. Where I thought you were going to go with this when you mentioned the trait thing—
Paul: Yeah—
Jase: is that humor is so subjective, and that there's also that, like, is funniness actually a trait, or is it just in certain groups we find certain people funnier? Like, maybe a certain dry sense of humor works with certain people and not others, or like those of us that grew up with certain content might find certain things funny and not others. I wonder about that too. Okay. Yeah.
Paul: Yeah. Okay. This is a great question. I want to go to one of the classic evolutionary psychological papers on this topic. Cause I think it's really instructive along these lines. So this is a paper by Greengross and Miller, and it was really one of the first papers to claim this link between intelligence and humor production ability. And argued that, okay, this was something that would be evolutionarily valuable, like humor as cue to intelligence. So what they did is they looked at a bunch of folks and they got measures of intelligence, what are considered to be reasonable measures of intelligence, and it's like verbal ability on tests. And then they had a humor measure that was then coded by other people for how funny these folks were being. And I wanna stop there and just say, actually, that's pretty good. As these sorts of methods go, you've got a standardized measure of intelligence, and then you've got some sort of objective coded measure of how funny these folks are. But now I just wanna make a couple points. One is that the way that they assess whether somebody was funny or not was basically how clever a caption they wrote on a New Yorker cartoon that had had the—
Dedeker: Yes, I'm familiar with this.
Paul: Oh, wow.
Jase: Yes.
Dedeker: Okay.
Paul: So that's kind of another measure of verbal ability. Like, this is really starting to get into, like, are we sure we're capturing humor separate from intelligence, or are you assessing the same thing twice? It's not totally clear to me. And even then, these things are not super highly correlated. Like, if you scored highly on this test, there was, like, a 60% chance your captions were gonna be funny. So I think to your point is it's far from determinative that, you know, there's gonna be widespread agreement about what's funny. People are gonna disagree about what makes for a funny caption. And just because you're a really smart person doesn't mean you're gonna make funny, funny New Yorker captions.
Dedeker: Was that one blinded though? Because there's also all these studies that indicate that when people know, like for instance, the gender of the person writing the caption, that influences how funny they rate it or not.
Paul: Oh yeah, I can absolutely see that having a big impact.
Dedeker: And that usually like if the name attached to it reads as feminine, they're more likely to indicate that it's less funny than if it's the same exact caption, but attributed to a masculine name.
Paul: Yeah.
Jase: Really?
Paul: It wouldn't surprise me if that dwarfs the like, you know, actual carryover from, you know, how you performed on the intelligence test. Yeah. Yeah.
Jase: Well, I mean, that's a good segue actually, because one of the other things that comes up in this sort of evolutionary psychology approach to humor is also this very gendered— again, this research is generally always assuming heterosexual cisgender couples here— but is this idea that men need to be the producers of humor and that women should be the receivers of humor. And there's all these arguments about like, oh, well, women should be more selective, and so therefore they would be looking for this evidence of these positive traits of humor in a male. And then for him, he needs her to be receptive to him. So that's how he knows she'll be a loyal mate or, you know, all that. There's like layers and layers and layers of Evo-Psych stuff on top of you.
Emily: Yeah.
Dedeker: I feel a little nauseated with each of those layers.
Paul: Yeah. Well, yeah. So like there's a lot of lay Evo-Psych arguments along these lines, which kind of generally fit into this category of men need to impress with the most desirable traits that they can muster. With a few core exceptions that maybe we're gonna get to, but that for the most part, it's pretty easy to get to a case that, well, whatever the trait is in question, if it's desirable, women should really be cueing into it because men are really the ones that gotta go around impressing women and women are the choosy ones. That as an explanation for how heterosexual relationships are formed, it's okay in the sense that explains like casual sex encounters, like encounters with strangers especially. But when you look across the board, actually the extent of gender differences in like who wants a relationship, who's pursuing a relationship, who wants this thing to last. It's true that men generally want relationships more than women, but it's actually a pretty small effect. And men can be choosy too when it comes to relationships. You know, we're also attracted to women that have fancy traits, that are smart and funny and ambitious and all of these attributes as well. And we can get into some of the studies that I think were surprising about 20 years ago showing the lack of gender differences in the appeal of various traits. But humor kind of slots in right alongside intelligence and ambition when it comes to the theorizing about differences between men and women.
Jase: Yeah, and I want to get into that a little bit in the second part of this episode. But something that I thought was interesting as a contradiction though, to this idea that, well, you know, men should be producers of funniness and women should be receivers of funniness. Yeah. Is that this directly contradicts this 2011 University of British Columbia study that used OkCupid's data.
Paul: Hmm.
Jase: And that was the one that looked at whether people are smiling or not in their pictures and found that men with big broad smiles were generally rated as less attractive and less likely to be selected than men who had a more neutral or like, proud demeanor.
Paul: Oh, fascinating.
Jase: And then women with big smiles were more likely to be rated as attractive, which almost seems like a flip of that. And so that was another just weird factor that to throw in there and be like, we don't really understand what's going on. What is this all about?
Emily: I can see women or anyone looking at a man and maybe seeing them with a big smile and thinking, okay, maybe they're goofy, or maybe they're not going to be as masculine in certain ways and protect me, perhaps. But I know for myself, if I see a guy who's smiling, that makes me feel safer around him. Whereas somebody who is kind of brooding, that always makes me feel a little bit like, I don't know if I can trust this person and I don't know if this person is potentially going to be dangerous to me. And so that's really fascinating just looking at that. And I wonder if that ever changes throughout the course of someone's life as well, or based on their circumstances, things that they might have been through over the course of their life, perhaps.
Jase: That's a great point. Yeah. Like, would you have learned a different attraction pattern to be like, oh, actually I've learned to stay away from that, or I've learned to be more attracted to this. Yeah, that's an interesting question. So I think all of this ties nicely into a lot of your work, Paul. So in 2008, you did this landmark speed-dating research, and one of the things that you talk about in your book as well is this difference between our Stated Preferences and then our Revealed Preferences. Can you give us a little bit about what that is and how that fits with everything we're talking about here?
Paul: Yeah, I mean, this was one of the big insights that came out of the whole suite of speed-dating studies that were all being done. I mean, at the time that speed-dating was becoming a thing in the mid-2000s, you saw all these studies. And what we realized is that there are two ways of thinking about how good is this trait in a partner. One way of thinking about it is, look, we can ask people. We can ask people, how much do you want a romantic partner who has the trait humorous or good sense of humor? Word it however you like. So when you ask people questions like that, you're getting at their ideas about what they like in a partner. And sometimes those ideas can be very, very valuable and very interesting. But what speed-dating made us realize is that there's this second way of thinking about what people might like, and it's what you might call a Revealed Preference. But you're looking at the appeal of the trait in a set of partners that you may or may not want to date. That may or may not is really crucial. It's like we need a set of folks that you like, kind of like, or some you kind of dislike. But I'm looking at the traits that differentiate the folks you like from the folks you don't. And speed-dating is, it's just a really clean way of getting at that idea. So we can look to see, Jase, if you go speed-dating, are you more attracted to the funny people than the people who aren't all that funny? And then we can look, well, regardless of how much you said you cared about finding a partner who was funny, we can look at how much it actually appealed to you. And basically for any trait you might want to look at, that correlation is very close to zero. In other words, you—
Jase: That's wild.
Paul: Yeah.
Jase: Any trait.
Dedeker: No, it's insane.
Jase: Yeah.
Paul: Any kind of single trait, it's really, really bad. If you force me at gunpoint, pick one trait that might work, it's stuff where you, where there's much more variability in whether people say they like it or not. So I would point to like religiosity, but even then it's real small. Like it's shockingly small. The correlation between, for example, how much you say you like partners who are religious and how much you actually like partners who are religious. I mean, thinking about college, I definitely remember I would have told you I wasn't into religious partners and yet kept falling for those girls. I don't know how that kept happening.
Emily: Wow.
Paul: Yeah. So just, you know, but this is what happens. Self-insight is hard. And we saw that in the early speed-dating work.
Dedeker: Well, so are we all just deluding ourselves whenever we make a dating profile or try to express to someone what we're looking for or complain to our girlfriends about, I can't find a person who hits X, Y, and Z. Like, we're all just deluded about what we actually think that we want.
Paul: I mean, deluded is strong, but I think it's—
Dedeker: we'll soften it the way the kids do these days.
Paul: Delulu. I think it's very easy to lock into— this gets worse actually, if I tell you, okay, just focus on the three things that you really have got to have. That makes the problem even worse.
Jase: Really?
Paul: Yeah. So I really think that's the main challenge that people face is you really lock into I need somebody with X, Y, Z qualities and I'm going to spend a lot of effort crafting my pool with people who only have those qualities. I think at best you're spending your time sort of crafting your pool for no real reason. But I think at worst you're limiting your options. You're not expanding your horizons to folks that actually might end up being a good fit. So, I'm always in favor, you know, for people who are single and dating and looking to find a partner rather than like curating your list. So you're only meeting the people who look perfect on paper. I'd rather you just like meet more people and kind of see where things go.
Jase: I mean, yeah. You're kind of saying some stuff that's pretty damning of dating apps and the way you can filter by various properties and only see matches that meet certain criteria. But I'm very positive about parties.
Paul: I mean, I like parties. Remember those?
Jase: Yeah, it's been a long time, but all right. Yeah, that's great. So we're going to go on to talk about some newer research as well within this speed-dating lineage that you were one of the pioneers in here. But first, we're going to take a quick break to talk about our sponsors for this show. For you listening, please take a moment, check them out, use the links in our description. That does really help support our show, helps us keep doing this every week for free for all of you out there. And then of course, you can join our private community if you'd rather get ad-free episodes and have access to our amazing community of people to discuss these episodes with. All right. So Paul, when I was talking to you before this, you sent me a study. This is from 2024 by Wainwright and colleagues.
Paul: Yeah.
Jase: And they looked at humor in 554 speed daters. So they also did a speed-dating study and they were specifically looking at some of these evo-psych tropes that we've talked about. And so the one that jumped out to me first in this is this thing about men being producers of humor and women being receivers of humor. And basically they showed when it actually comes down to it, both genders value funniness the same. Yeah, like kind of blew apart that gender difference idea.
Paul: And look, we're not— as a scientist, I'm not supposed to like look at any one study and be like, yeah, it's over. But this study is pretty good, right? Because it's a nice large sample. And, you know, these folks are just going in being like, hey, let's just let the data speak. I mean, how much do we want partners when we find them funny? Now, again, I want to draw an important contrast here. With some of that earlier work that we were talking about with the intelligence tests and the New Yorker captions, those were like independent judgments of how funny these captions are. But now people are going into these speed-dating events and saying, okay, if I think you are funny, do I like you more? And the answer is absolutely. We like people more when we find them funny. It's really exciting to go on a date and find the other person funny and be laughing a lot. Was there any gender difference in the power of finding somebody funny? No, there was no gender difference at all. Men like it and women like it.
Jase: Yeah. And so going along with that was this idea that if our date is laughing, that means they're into us.
Paul: Yeah.
Jase: As soon as I said that, Dedeker and Emily both made faces of like, mm-hmm.
Dedeker: Mm-hmm.
Paul: Yeah.
Emily: I think there might be a gender difference there.
Paul: Yeah.
Emily: Yeah.
Dedeker: There has to be. There has to be.
Emily: Yes, of course.
Paul: Yeah. And it's really well done because they they actually coded the laughter, right? So it's not—
Jase: they recorded each of the little speed dates, right? Yeah. And coded how often they laughed and stuff like that.
Paul: Yeah. And basically it's a little complex. It's like if your partner while speed-dating was laughing, it's like there's a reasonable bet that they thought you were funny, but it was still a coin flip whether or not they were actually into you. And I think that illustrates, hey, there could be a lot of reasons that we're laughing. Like, some of that laughter, guys, was nervous laughter. Like, you are making them uncomfortable.
Emily: Yeah.
Jase: And there's already a level of nervousness in a speed date or a first date or any of those situations, right? So I imagine that's amplified there too.
Emily: And yeah, I mean, finding someone funny is kind of subjective, right? Because I think what's funny to me may not be funny to you. And finding someone's humor funny is also like a very personal thing.
Paul: Yeah.
Emily: And so, yes, I might go on a date with someone and be like, wow, that person was a riot. And another person may go on a date with them and think, geez, they were really crass, or I thought that they were over the top or they were too goofy or whatever it might be. And I think at various levels of attraction, you might find someone more funny or not. You might find the same joke 10 years down the line really annoying. That you found hilarious the first time that you started dating them. So I don't know, it's just this is such a subjective thing that I also— I think there are, of course, people out there who are objectively funny, but what we find funny personally is so specific to us as individuals.
Dedeker: But I want to do a callback to something you said just in passing very early on that you mentioned something about how as a dyad, like, we're trying to construct something together. And when I think about my own, I guess, deluded list of things I look for in a partner— sorry, I don't tend to think of humor as much as I think of playfulness. And I think they're very closely linked. Maybe some people can make the argument that that's basically saying the same thing, but for me, I'm looking at, can we improv together? Can we build off of each other? And I think that cues more into— it's less of, I think that you're funny like the way that I'd find a stand-up comedian funny, and more like can you listen to me enough to play off of it? If I toss the ball to you, can you catch it? It's like, that's the thing that I find the most exciting.
Paul: Yeah.
Dedeker: With dating is, I think speaks more to that. Can we construct together? Can we play together? Can we even in the context of a speed date create almost this tiny temporary micro bubble of the two of us playing a game together?
Paul: So this is an incredible point that the two of you are making that, that you can also get out of speed-dating work. It's not in the particular Wainwright paper that we're talking about, but I've seen data too that support exactly what you're saying, that we do go into things like speed-dating and, yeah, we agree that like this guy was a little funnier than this guy. On average, there's going to be some amount of agreement there. But the lion's share of our judgments is going to be idiosyncratic. I found this woman particularly funny and the rest of my friends didn't. I wanted to spend the rest of the party hanging out with her because she was cracking me up. Guys, I don't know what your problem is, but we're really, we're really connecting over here. And that is indeed what we tend to see. I mean, we call it relationship variance. It's always there when you look at traits. It's there when you look at, you know, are you attracted to somebody? Do you want to date somebody? But it's really the core thing. And it's certainly there with things like sense of humor.
Jase: And so they also looked at the receiving of humor, like how much you laughed at and were receptive to the other person's jokes. And the one that I thought was interesting there is that they found that being more receptive to the other person's humor did not make you more attractive to them, but it did make them a little bit more likely to be willing to go on another date with you.
Paul: Yeah, I thought, I thought this one was interesting because I would have suspected that that would have had more of an effect, like this idea that like, huh, they seem to think I was pretty funny. I would have thought that would be even stronger level of appeal than what we saw. But I think you're right. It's like, it's like a little appealing to think that way, but not as crucial as, hey, I found her funny and I want to go out with her again.
Jase: Right, right. So there is a certain value to like being receptive. And it makes me wonder about what you were saying, Dedeker, that for you, the playfulness is an indicator that they're actually actively listening to you and responding to you and not just sort of bulldozing with jokes. And seeing someone be receptive to your humor does prove that they're listening to you, right? Like, it shows that they're actively engaged with you and listening. So I could see that there's a certain appeal. I agree though, I would have expected it to be more to show like, oh yeah, they're actually really engaged with me, I should want to hang out with them.
Emily: And it's an ego boost.
Jase: That's true, especially that—
Emily: I mean, for everyone, but I was gonna say especially for men.
Paul: I mean, One thing that's really interesting when you think about humor and what it takes to be funny, and I'm by no means a, I mean, there are really people who study humor specifically, like what is funny. That is not me. But many of our jokes, the things that, especially the things we find diadically funny, are rooted in a history. I mean, I don't know about you all, but when I get together with my like high school friends, it's all just like rehashing of old jokes. I mean, it's like all we do. And why do we do this? It's because you're reliving the sense of shared history and it feels really good to do that. So now in a dating context, what does that look like? It's like a callback from an hour earlier. Again, this is why I like parties. So you got time for callbacks. So I have a little moment with you early, circle back 45 minutes later. Reference something from earlier. It shows that, 'Hey, I remember that conversation earlier. That stuck with me. I'm still thinking about you.' And it conveys again, something truly dyadic. And I think that's something that can really click with people.
Jase: That makes a lot of sense. Well, so something that I wanted to get at with that too is there's this other evopsych thing from some evolutionary anthropologists. Uh, so in 2008, Thomas Flamson and Barrett published a study testing what they called the Encryption Hypothesis.
Paul: Ooh, interesting.
Jase: And the idea is that a joke acts as an encrypted message to assess if someone's underlying values and worldview matches yours or is compatible with yours. So to test this, they presented people with jokes that were either low encryption, meaning all the background that you need to understand the joke was explicitly spelled out, or they had other ones that were high encryption, which relied heavily on unstated insider knowledge about the thing. In order to get the joke, you had to have some insider knowledge. And they found that people who already shared the background knowledge preferred the highly encrypted versions of the jokes. It's like they preferred the ones that required them to have some previous knowledge to get the joke over the ones that were explained outright.
Paul: That's really interesting.
Jase: It's interesting. It definitely makes me want a lot of follow-up studies to get into this more. But I was thinking about this where you're saying like inside jokes within a group. By having those, we're kind of proving to each other we're all part of our own in-group by having that joke. And within a dyad, you've got that sense of, oh, this is our own private secret language, our inside jokes, things like that. But when I think about this in other contexts, so we just last weekend did a retreat that was all about play and like being present and playfulness. And it was very cool, like sober platonic retreat that we did. But in the preparation for it, like while we were all getting ready, the few of us that were hosting it, putting it on, were making jokes and things like that. And I found myself being really tuned in to which people laughed at which of the jokes that I made, or like which jokes did people make that I was like, oh, I get that. Especially if it was a cultural reference to some cartoon or a website or something, you know, and it made me wonder about that. Like, how much is this, like, I felt closer to people who laughed at stuff that I was like, oh, you have a shared touchpoint to me that I felt like, oh, I feel closer to this person now. I want to go talk to them more because I know that we have this certain cultural thing in common with some content that we consumed 20 years ago or whatever it was. So anyway, I've just been pondering over that and how it might show up here based on our age, our, you know, socioeconomic status, like what nerdy shit we were into at points in our lives. Like any of those things could get encoded this way.
Paul: All right. I love this idea. And it's, I like how it is similar to, but also a little bit different from the idea that I was proposing earlier, because I think earlier I was suggesting that an in-joke without a lot of context that's going to be obtuse to a lot of people. Conveyed something deeply dyadic about a shared history that I have with a particular person. But you're right, it could instead convey something about shared values. Hey, I'm still the same person that I was like last week or last year, or, you know, when we were 17. I mean, another way of thinking about this is that, look, when we're meeting strangers, what we try to do is we try to like figure out, hey, are we on the same team here? And maybe that's in a sense what people are trying to do. Like, okay, I literally don't know you, but like, did we both grow up watching DuckTales? I mean, if we did, then like, hey, like maybe we're on the same team here. And that there's like a rationale to why people do that.
Dedeker: Well, that sounds like the uncertainty reduction theory stuff from the '70s about like when we meet a stranger, there is this drive to want to reduce the uncertainty that we feel about them and about the relationship. And so then we have this information-seeking behavior. And I guess it makes sense that for some people that tactic, that channel opens up through humor.
Paul: Yeah, I think that's spot on. That, that, and that a lot of times that's what people are trying to do in real interactions. I think when we're swiping, we've like got this threshold and we're like, you gotta be awesome or I'm not going to spend my time on you. But, but in real interactions, we, you know, we kind of like want things to go well. We put a lot of effort into keeping things as smooth as possible. I mean, most of us don't go around like causing trouble. We want things to be, to go smoothly. And so if you're looking for those like similar cultural touchpoints, that can help a lot.
Jase: Well, I'm glad to hear that we've come up with your next research project where you can look at—
Paul: Absolutely. Yeah. It's really good. It's really good.
Jase: And figure that out.
Dedeker: Yeah.
Jase: It's, this is making me think about this research on humor more generally too, about, you know, what is funny. And when you look at comedy shows, there's a huge difference in what comedy looks like, even in that more like presentational form of comedy that's not about just the rapport and playfulness with each other, but a show that all of the humor is in like little witty banter and like wordplay versus other ones where it's more subtle callbacks or references to things or other ones where it's just absurdist nonsense that happens. And that's funny, like in the unexpected. There's just like so many ways humor can look. And so that I think is another factor that could show up in all of this of—
Paul: yeah, yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think there's a fascinating component to time too. I mean, look, on, on our show we spend a lot of time looking at these romantic movies. Many of them are comedies, and sometimes that comedy has aged well, sometimes it's aged really, really badly. And it can just be the nature of the jokes that they're trying to make. I think the key factor in whether something is going to age badly is often linked to where do they think it's funny to punch? Is it punching up, punching down, punching sideways? Like, punching down is just one of the things that just tends not to age all that well. And so, yeah, you can see that in a lot of the movies that we cover.
Emily: I thought you were talking about actual punch because I listened to your episode on Groundhog Day. And yeah, Andie MacDowell slapping him over and over and over again. And just that now we wouldn't put that in there. It just wouldn't be in there at all. But they found it funny back in 1993 or whenever that came out. Yeah.
Jase: Well, and I see where I thought you were going to go is Dedeker Winston and I watch a lot of stuff from the '90s. That's been our thing the last few years. And guys getting hit in the balls is like pinnacle humor for stuff in the '90s. Yeah. We just rewatched Clue last night, actually. And sure enough, At least once someone got kicked in the balls. I think that was—
Dedeker: that was 1985. That was—
Jase: they were an early adopter of the real pioneer in— yeah, wow.
Paul: Yeah, you know, if something changed with, with The Office generation, the, the shift to the like looking at the camera and the meta thing, right? I feel like the, the physical humor started to take a back seat.
Jase: But I think that's fair.
Paul: Yeah, yeah. But I find this fascinating and extremely complicated, and, and I think that the creators who have the healthiest sense of this stuff are the ones who are like, yep, you know what, in 20 years this might be absolutely unacceptable. And we're making it for right now. We're doing things that are funny right now and we'll probably be apologizing for it in 10 to 20 years. And if that's your attitude, like, great.
Emily: Interesting.
Jase: Sure.
Emily: It's almost like those comedies were on a stage and so they had to show rather than tell. And then like things have become much more introspective now. And almost like self-deprecating. A lot of people in films today have to be self-deprecating in order to be funny.
Paul: Yeah, that's a good point.
Jase: Yeah, that's a wonderful segue to where we're going to go next. But first, we're going to take another quick break to talk about our sponsors for this show. We really do appreciate them sponsoring us, letting us put this show out there every week for all of you for free. So please do take a moment, listen to them, use our promo codes and links and stuff in the show description. That really does help us. And of course, you can support us directly by joining our community at Multiamory.com/join. And there you can get ad-free episodes, access to our monthly video groups, hang out in our discussion threads about all of the episodes like this one. You can have a discussion more in-depth in there. We would love to have you as part of that at Multiamory.com/join. So Emily, you made such a good point about the different types of humor and the self-defeating versus the kind of more physical comedy, overt humor. I think when it comes to film and TV, part of that is also the resolution that we have and the size of our screens now allows us to see—
Emily: Oh, good point.
Jase: Way more subtle stuff than we used to. It used to be like, oh, I've got this little tiny CRT TV across the room. Yeah.
Emily: Yeah.
Jase: Yeah. So I think that's a little bit of an aspect there. But as far as types of humor goes, something that I thought was interesting was actually from a 2003 study. So this one's a bit older. This is psychologist Rod Martin and his colleagues. Where they were looking at categorizing the types of humor that people use. And so they created what's called the Humor Styles Framework, where they broke humor down into four styles. So there's positive ones like affiliative humor. So that's a little bit like that playful banter that Dedeker was talking about, kind of creating a sense of in-group. And then like negative ones like self-deprecating, self-defeating humor, where you kind of make yourself the punchline of a joke to gain approval. Was the way that they kind of categorized that. And so follow-up studies since then looking at this in terms of dating and relationships find that the self-defeating humor tends to be predictive of lower self-esteem and higher anxiety, but also can lead to greater social rejection, actually. And so while self-deprecating and tearing yourself down might temporarily put others at ease, it can also sacrifice the perception of like, confidence that drives attraction. And so you might actually be kind of sabotaging yourself with too much self-deprecation.
Paul: Yeah, that's so interesting because I think I would have gathered ahead of time that it's good to go in at least with a sense of humor about yourself. I mean, the story I like to tell along these lines— Eli's not here, so I get to tell this story. So Eli Finkel, my co-host on Love Factually, he and I went speed-dating back in the day. So I was a grad student, he was a professor, we were both single. Actually, a number of people in our grad class were single. So we all went speed-dating, see what is it about.
Jase: And he, before or after you did the study?
Paul: Before, before, because we were like, yeah, wait, can we use this to collect data? I don't know, let's go check it out.
Jase: Okay, it's nice.
Paul: We go to a bar in Chicago, we do speed-dating proper. And what he does is he, prints out a bunch of laminated cards. And these cards have questions on them. And the questions are from a very famous social psychological study called the Fast Friends Procedure.
Dedeker: Aron ones.
Jase: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, okay.
Dedeker: Art Aron. Yeah.
Paul: Exactly. So it's like, oh, if you had a crystal ball, like, you know, what would you ask it? Okay. So he pulls these out of the event. Now, why is he doing this? Okay. Because he's making fun of himself. Like, look at me, I'm the nerdy professor. Like, it has a self-deprecation value. I mean, if he were here, he'd be like, no, I was interested in seeing if they actually worked. But no, the self-deprecation component to this, that I thought it was funny, and I think a number of the other women thought it was funny, but it's interesting that maybe in other hands or maybe on average, actually, that doesn't go that well to do things that make you look a little silly. So that's fascinating and maybe does update what I would give as a recommendation.
Dedeker: Well, but okay, I'm going to split hairs on this one because I think there's a difference in humor where you are, yeah, punching down upon yourself.
Paul: Yeah.
Dedeker: But then I think what's on the other side of that coin is having the confidence and self-esteem to not take yourself so seriously.
Paul: Yeah, for sure.
Dedeker: Like telegraphing that you're not so insecure about yourself that you can't be a little silly, look a little silly.
Jase: Yeah.
Dedeker: And I think that's a nuance that we can pick up on. Maybe at the level of just what our nervous systems can feel into. Maybe it's hard to put into words. But I do think we can pick up on the difference between someone is using humor to cover up their insecurities versus someone is using humor because they actually feel more secure in themselves and they can joke about themselves and seem a little silly.
Jase: So yeah, this is something that, again, this was from 2003 is when they kind of came up with this taxonomy. And there have been some studies since then. I think there's definitely more to look into here, but just to look at some of the things that they hypothesized about this. So one is this trade-off between warmth and competence. And so the punching down on yourself, the kind of thing, right, the self-deprecating creates like warmth and a sense of inclusiveness and all that, but it downplays your competence. And so there's like a balance between these things. Although I do think Dedeker makes an interesting point of, I bet it comes across very different when you're self-deprecating about something you're actually self-deprecating about, or when you can kind of treat yourself with a lightness that shows you are confident in that part of yourself. So that piece I think is interesting. One thing that got brought up with this too is the idea that humor releases tension, right? It's kind of a way of releasing tension. And another hypothesis is that people who jump to humor too quickly to defuse tension can also lose some of the, I don't know, like edginess that's involved in flirtation. And I'm like, I don't know what to think about this, but it's just an interesting extra hypothesis in there that came up. Huh.
Paul: So it's like, literally, if I'm laughing, I'm not feeling sexually attracted to you in that exact moment. I guess that's the idea. Maybe it will follow later, but you don't want to accidentally cut the sexual tension too early before it has a chance to build. That's an interesting idea. It would be really hard to capture, but yeah, it's an interesting idea.
Jase: For sure, for sure. And so, so with all this though, I want us to talk a little bit about like, what is— what good is humor, and what can we take away from this, right? What can our listeners use and apply in their lives? So I think one is we have this idea that being humorous is overall good. It is perceived as attractive equally by men and women. And I would imagine this probably also holds up with non-heterosexual, non-cisgender relationships, since it does seem to be a fairly universal thing. However, it's not like the be-all end-all attractiveness factor that people often think that it will be for themselves.
Dedeker: Right.
Jase: So that's maybe piece one.
Paul: I think that's very useful. I think realizing that humor is taking place at least as much, if not more, at the level of the dyad than at the level of the person. So you can be a pretty funny person. People might generally agree that you're funny. But I'm sorry, like she's not that into you and she actually doesn't think you're all that funny. So, you know, there's going to be a lot of relational variability around somebody's traits.
Jase: For sure. Yeah. And I think there is a certain aspect of, I think Emily kind of teased this before, that a certain joke might feel funnier coming from someone that you already have a certain sense of either attraction or just that I like this person, that a joke might land well from them and from someone straight out the gate that you're not so sure about yet, or you don't quite know if you trust yet, might really not land.
Emily: Humor is not the only thing that you should be looking at. It's a combination of many things, I think, is what we're finding here.
Jase: But something I've pondered about, because you mentioned that when we think about traits that we would find attractive versus when you do the speed-dating studies where you have this pool of people that you do and don't want to date and then kind of looking at what traits emerge there, It made me wonder a little bit about when we think about traits in the abstract, we're kind of already mentally limiting ourselves to the pool of people that we have dated or would date. And so then it's like within that pool, what are the traits that I have liked? And that, that's an interesting dynamic there. Because when we look at humor, as far as maintaining a long-term relationship or a friendship, humor does come up quite a bit in that research. Right? Like the Gottmans talk about Repair Attempts, and humor is often part of that after there's been some break in the connection, right? Small or large, that humor can be a way to help repair that and rebuild a connection.
Paul: Yeah. I mean, this is a very, very important point. I look, I spend a lot of time thinking about, like, attraction and dating and relationship initiation, but many people will spend, you know, most of their romantic interactions engaging with somebody where they have a long-term relationship. And where, look, conflict comes up, negativity comes up. And one real challenge with negativity and conflict is that it tends to have a gravity to it. Once one of you gets mad, it's really easy for that anger to pull the other person in. And now you're both angry at each other. And I do think humor can be one of the best ways of breaking out of that. I mean, and talk about having the ability to laugh at yourself. You know, the ability to note like, oh, I'm doing that pattern that I always do. I bug you about, you know, planning our weekend for Friday at 5 PM and you hate this. And, you know, here I go again. Like the ability to reflect and use humor to defuse things can be very helpful.
Dedeker: Well, but how are you doing on that front? Does your spouse find you funny?
Paul: Wow.
Dedeker: I mean, hesitation.
Emily: Yeah, no.
Paul: That should be time.
Dedeker: I think so.
Paul: I think she's hilarious.
Jase: All right, you got that going for you.
Paul: Yeah, so that— so I did, I did well. I think I'm doing okay. I'm doing okay using the humor though when things are tense. That's hard. I'm still— I'm, you know, I practice, but it can be very, very challenging to use humor in the right way to defuse because, because sometimes it can seem like it's minimizing.
Dedeker: Yes, right.
Paul: So it's a fine line.
Dedeker: Yeah, very fine line.
Jase: Yeah. How about now? I want to ask everybody, how about you, Emily?
Paul: How's it work?
Emily: Oh, I think—
Jase: Does Alf find you funny?
Emily: I am pretty funny. Like, I— Yeah, that's a great explanation.
Jase: There it is.
Emily: No, I think I'm funny just because I'm so deadpan. Like, my voice lends itself to humor. And so to a lot of people, I don't have to say much and they find it funny just because of how I sound. But yeah, no, I mean, I think he's really goofy and therefore it's difficult to be annoyed with him because of how goofy he is. So we do a good job infusing humor into any, like, challenging moments. Humor and communication, I think it goes hand in hand. And I mean, immediately I thought of like Microscripts here, which is one of our tools, which can try to infuse like kind of a humorous or an idiosyncratic language type thing into the relationship or into the moment that is challenging to sort of break it off of the path of going down like a worse route. Than it would otherwise. So no, I'm hilarious.
Jase: So how about you, Dedeker Winston?
Dedeker: Oh well, yeah, no, thank God that you can make me laugh. I think I can make you laugh. I— it's not just— yeah, you're really good. You're— I think you are very good at threading that needle of knowing when a good joke is going to bust me out of it. But you're also really good at recognizing— I mean, you'll just tell me point blank, like, ah, you seem like you hate jokes right now. And then I can be like, yes, I hate jokes right now.
Paul: That's a good line.
Jase: Oh yeah, that's We said it at the top of the episode.
Dedeker: But then that even of itself is pretty funny, right? So yeah.
Jase: That's like become an in-joke of ours. I think asking someone that out of the blue might not land as well.
Paul: Yeah.
Jase: We've established that that's, uh, there are times when you just hate jokes. It's, yeah.
Dedeker: But Paul Eastwick, when you were first attaching and courting your spouse, was all this in your brain? Because you were already researching all this stuff.
Paul: You know, to some extent. But I think that even when you study this stuff, and she and I have been together for about 10 years now, so it's been a minute. But even when you're studying all this stuff, when you're actually experiencing it in the moment, you know, there's a real tendency for the rom-com scripts to take over. And you're just like, well, this is different. Nobody's ever felt this. And like, there is no trove of information that will help me with this. I am pioneering this by myself. And right, I mean, it's silliness. Of course, other people have gone through this. Generalizable principles. So, so I think it was there. It was certainly there to some extent. And in fact, one thing that did come up honestly is that I remember treating her as if she was exceptionally funny from very early on. And a little bit later she confided to me, she was like, I really like that because nobody else had actually found me all that funny before. And I'm like, What? Yeah, this is funny. This is funny. This is funny. She's like, I didn't see myself that way then.
Jase: Oh, sweet. There you go.
Dedeker: Yeah. No, but when you say treat your memories of treating her, it sounds like, but it was organic for you. It wasn't strategic, right?
Paul: Right, right, right. Exactly. Exactly. No, it was, it was pretty organic.
Emily: Yeah.
Jase: That's great. Yeah. So as far as this goes in terms of maintaining relationships, there's quite a lot of research about this. Like there was a longitudinal study from UC Berkeley that found that as married couples' age that humor often replaces bickering. Which— What, normally?
Dedeker: On its own?
Jase: Yeah, that just kind of over time, if you have humor in your relationship, it'll kind of replace bickering. And so I think that if someone writes a paper about that part specifically, and I don't have the source in front of me right now.
Paul: Fascinating.
Jase: But the title of that paper should be "From Bickering to Snickering," I think is the—
Emily: That's good. The title of that. You're hilarious.
Paul: Yeah, that's funny. That's funny.
Jase: Yeah. I'll put that caption on a New Yorker cartoon and people will—
Paul: I gotta be honest that, that finding surprises me. I guess it would not surprise me if the snickering couples are the ones who survive.
Jase: And maybe if there is some self-selection.
Paul: Yeah. But, but, but I would think that they, they would've accounted for that, but you know, I, hey, all totally fascinating and you know, I, I hope it's true.
Jase: Right.
Paul: Yeah.
Jase: I imagine there's some self-selection there. The ones that lasted to be long-term relationships had that trait.
Paul: I mean, there is, there is something that happens, you know, as people age. If you think about like how people feel about their relationships or their life or anything at different ages, there is a bit of a nadir in like the, you know, 40s, 50s, you know, when jobs are tough and parenting is tough and everything is tough. You know, so it's possible that as life starts to ease up again, you move to that active retirement community and you join a bridge club and a tennis.
Dedeker: Now you have time to be funny.
Paul: Exactly. I mean, and pickleball is funny.
Jase: And so, you know, that's true.
Paul: Yeah. That's a good point. Yeah.
Jase: So as we're coming to the end here, I'm curious actually to put this to everyone, not just to Paul, but if we each have maybe one actionable piece of advice or a takeaway we'd want to leave our listeners with? And this could be related to the person who always ends up as like the funny friend but not the romantic prospect, or this could be about people who get really nervous going into dates, or maybe advice to a person you think makes too many jokes. Could be, it could be whatever it is. I want us to cover the whole spectrum here.
Emily: I feel like when it comes to long-term relationships, if you feel like the humor has gone away, that's a really big indicator that perhaps you have something fundamental to look at within the scope of the relationship and the health of the relationship. Because I think back to my longest-term relationship and how I would say probably for the vast majority of the time that we were together, the humor was very, very much not there. And I look at my current relationship and think about how often we laugh together and how lovely that is. And how much safer the relationship feels because of that. So I think humor can be an indicator of relationship health. So just something to be aware of and maybe a good thing to ask yourself, do I get to laugh with my partner? Do I— not just do I find them funny, but do we laugh together? Do we find things mutually funny? And is it a good way to defuse challenging situations? Are we able to kind of laugh at each other, laugh at ourselves? Laugh at the silliness and absurdity of what we might be getting upset about in the moment.
Jase: Yeah, it just makes me think of something that Dedeker, you've mentioned before about having a partner who's funny or who makes jokes, because I often find myself being silly to try to get you to laugh. But you mentioned that—
Dedeker: yeah, yeah, you were so motivated towards entertaining me. It's the best.
Jase: I have a strong drive to that.
Dedeker: Very strong drive, and I love it.
Jase: But you mentioned once to me the difference between when you've dated someone who makes a lot of jokes, but it felt like it was for them.
Dedeker: Yes.
Jase: Rather than someone who makes jokes for your benefit. Yeah.
Dedeker: See, that's why I keep coming back around. It's like, pay attention to me. Listen to me. Entertain me. Don't entertain yourself. Entertain me.
Paul: That's really good.
Jase: Yeah. But it kind of makes me think about that. Like, am I making jokes to get someone to laugh so I feel good about myself? Or am I making jokes for the other person's benefit so that they laugh. And I think that could also come into like a relationship building motivation for the jokes. It's about like, I want to foster more connection and I want to lift up the people I'm with versus I'm just making jokes to try to get attention on myself.
Paul: You know, I just want to go back to this idea that being funny, it's a little bit of a trait, but mostly not. And so that matters on both If you're looking for somebody, you deserve to be with somebody who you find funny. And like, just because the last three people you've met didn't find you funny, that doesn't mean that the that the fourth won't. So it is okay to look for a relationship where you both find each other funny. And look, a lot of it is ultimately dyadic.
Dedeker: I think my takeaway builds on that. I recently got the piece of advice that you can't really say the wrong thing to the right person. Now, there's caveats to that, right? I think if we scrub out saying stuff that's obviously like rude, aggressive, violent, universally offensive, sure, those could easily go under the umbrella of saying the wrong thing. However, when it comes to expressing yourself and your sense of humor, I really don't think you can say the wrong thing to the right person. And so I say fuck with people. Man. Not in a— not an aggressive, manipulative, I mean, kind of way, but just like flirt with— and I mean everyone. Flirt with everyone. Fuck with everyone. That's a little bit of the stance I've been taking recently also, of like not just being playful and cracking jokes and trying to use my sense of humor just with people I'm attracted to, but also just with everybody, with strangers. I think that's— that would be my takeaway.
Paul: I love that.
Jase: Go, go fuck around. Go have some fun. Go, go see what people you resonate with. I also like that it opens yourself up to some vulnerability too, of like, I'm realizing not everyone's going to like it and that's fine, right? They don't have to because then they weren't, they weren't the right ones for me. Love that. So Paul, I just want to say thank you so much for joining us again, for sharing your knowledge. And can you tell people where they can find your book and what kinds of other insights they can get from it?
Paul: Absolutely. So you can find my book Bonded by Evolution wherever you buy books. And yeah, I talk a lot about some of these tensions between what is relational and, you know, what is a trait and why we evolved to form close romantic bonds with each other. And if you want to hear me talk about movies, check out the Love Factually podcast with me and Eli Finkel.
Jase: Nice.
Emily: Yeah, it's so good.
Jase: Thank you so much. And for all of you out there, we have a question for you, which is how does humor show up in your relationships? How do you use humor in your relationships? We're very interested to hear from all of you. And if you want to discuss this episode in more depth, the best place to share your thoughts with other listeners is in the episode discussion channel in our Discord server, or you can post in our private Facebook group. You can get access to these groups and join our exclusive community by going to Multiamory.com/join. In addition, you can share with us publicly on Instagram @Multiamory_podcast. Multiamory is created and produced by Emily Matlack, Dedeker Winston, and me, Jase Lindgren. Our production assistant is Carson Collins. Our theme song is Forms I Know I Did by Josh and Anand from the Fractal Cave EP. The full transcript is available on this episode's page on Multiamory.com.