That myth about the funny guy getting the hot girl might not be only limited to movies and fiction, new research suggests that having a good sense of humor helps people get dates more easily.
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The study was conducted by Daniel Doerksen, a psychology student from the Simon Fraser University in Canada. He gathered two groups of people, 50 male students and 50 female students, and made them spend 4 minutes with each other in a speed dating setting. Before the experiment started, researchers who’d never met the subjects and who could be as objective as possible, ranked each one’s level of attractiveness and then averaged them out.
Each subject then met with 4 to 10 members of the opposite sex for a short period of time. After the “date”, test subjects answered a few questions regarding the encounter, including how attractive they found the other person, how funny they thought they were, and if they were interested in them romantically. After the experiment was over, researchers discovered that the more humorous the person was, the more their rating of attractiveness increased, especially compared to the initial ratings given by the researcher. For the men the results were more pronounced. Women found them much more attractive if they had a good sense of humor. When it comes to the women’s ratings, their attractiveness didn’t increase as much when they had a good sense of humor.
One thing that both groups had in common was that it’s never a bad thing to be funny, boy or girl. The least funny members of both groups were also considered the least attractive.
