Risqué business? Interpersonal anxiety and humor in the #MeToo era.

Abstract

Interpersonal anxiety (i.e., the fear of negative consequences from interacting with someone) may be more prominent in post-#MeToo organizations when interacting with someone of a different gender. Initial exchanges may particularly trigger this anxiety, obfuscating key organizational decisions such as hiring. Given humor's positive, intrapersonal stress-reduction effects, we propose that humor also reduces interpersonal anxiety. In three mixed-methods experiments with hiring managers, we examined the effects of applicant and evaluator gender (i.e., same-/mixed-gender dyad), positive applicant humor (i.e., a pun), and context (i.e., gender salience) in job interviews. Results showed that mixed-gender (vs. same-gender) interactions elicited more interpersonal anxiety, particularly when gender was more salient; mixed-gender interactions also predicted downstream attitudinal outcomes (e.g., social attraction and willingness to hire) and hiring decisions (e.g., selection and rejection) via interpersonal anxiety. Although humor reduced interpersonal anxiety and its consequences for female applicants, the opposite was true for male applicants when gender was salient, because it signaled some of the same expectations that initially triggered the interpersonal anxiety: the potential for harmful sexual behavior. In sum, we integrated diversity and humor theories to examine interpersonal anxiety in same-and mixed-gender interactions and then tested the extent to which humor relieved it.

Multimodal Prediction of Spontaneous Humour: A Novel Dataset and First Results

“…Depending on factors such as knowledge, norms and other cognitive structures, people perceive different events as humorous [7]. In other words, our annotation data reflect that the expression and perception of humour is highly contextual [60].…”

Critical events at critical times? A gendered identity approach on the path to (sustainable) leadership

“…For example, COVID-19 could be a mega-threat for people of Asian descent (because it triggered harassment and aggression toward people of apparent Asian decent), while police killings of people of color could be a mega-threat for people of color ( Leigh and Melwani, 2022 ). Similarly, the recent #MeToo movement (see Gloor et al, 2022b ) and the very recent unraveling of women’s reproductive rights in the United States ( Thomason et al, 2022 ) might constitute mega threats for women—the latter particularly for women of childbearing age and those who may want (more) children. Of note, mega-threats are negatively valenced by definition, in contrast to the subjectively positive and negative critical events that we focused on previously (e.g., in Proposition 2).…”

How to tell a joke: theories of successful humor and applications to the workplace

“…For example, an experimental study shows that a female manager using objectively the same humor as a male manager is rated as more disruptive (Evans et al , 2019) and thus has less utility. Similarly, humor used by a male applicant is viewed less positively than humor from a female applicant in a cross-gender hiring interview (Gloor et al , 2022). Beyond the context of gender, humor success can vary within a specific dyad following leader–member exchange principles, such that a leader might be funny to some employees but not others, depending upon characteristics of their unique dyadic relationship (Cooper, 2016).…”

“…However, this research shows that there can be drawbacks to using humor (Evans et al , 2019). For example, humor is appraised differently depending on whether it comes from a male or female (Gloor et al , 2022), potentially leading to bias (Evans et al , 2019). Unsuccessful humor attempts can reduce status (Bitterly et al , 2017).…”