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Does gender have an impact on irony judgment?

Elora Rivière1* and Maud Champagne-Lavau1
  • 1 Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, LPL, France

Introduction Research on the role of context in non-literal language has focused for a long time on the study of situational factors. Colston (2005), however, suggested that social and cultural factors may have an even greater impact on the processing of non-literal language. Gender, in particular, has emerged as having robust influences in non-literal language. For instance, Holtgraves (1991) highlighted that women are more likely than men to interpret statements as being indirect. Moreover gender seems to play role in irony processing at an early stage. Indeed Pexman et al., (2000), using an on-line reading time measure, showed that the gender of the speaker and of the addressee were integrated early in the processing. The gender impact was also pointed out for the production of irony, Gibbs (2000) observed that in conversation among friends, men tend to use sarcastic remarks twice as often as women did. Contrariwise Bowes & Katz (2011) found that in a context completion task, women produced irony as often as men did. The Colston & Lee (2004) experiment however goes in the same direction as Gibbs (2000) as they observed that when participants have to choose the speaker’s gender of an ironic utterance, both genders participants seem to agree that irony is more used by men. In another experiment, Colston & Lee (2004) asked participants to read scenarios and to rate the level of sarcasm of the speakers in the scenarios. In this experiment, speakers saying literal or sarcastic comments had stereotypical woman and man names. Colston & Lee (2004) observed that, when depicted making a sarcastic comment, men characters were not necessarily judged as being more sarcastic than women by participants. They also remarked that pragmatic functions of verbal irony better fit women discourse goals than men ones. While most previous research had explored the gender impact on the production of irony, we were interested in this potential impact on the perception and evaluation of irony. The aim of the present study was to assess – in French – whether gender influences the judgment of the degree of irony. To do so, the participants rated the degree of irony of a target utterance. We hypothesized that participants’ gender might impact the irony ratings. Material and Method The degree of irony of 946 target utterances embedded in produced contexts (cf. Figure 1) were rated by 74 women and 52 men (mean age = 23.5 ± 5.1; mean level of education = 14.8 ± 2.2) on a 7 points Likert scale (1 = not ironic, 7 = very ironic). To obtain these stimuli, 25 women and 27 men (mean age = 30.8 years ± 9.4; mean level of education = 15.6 years ± 2.0) were asked to complete, 20 minimal contexts to induce an interpretation of a target utterance (e.g., What beautiful weather) following the given instruction. Each participant received only one instruction: ironic or sincere. Before the context production task, 30 participants (mean age = 24.0 ± 3.1; mean level of education = 15.4 ± 1.8) evaluated the usage frequency of each target utterance as ironic or sarcastic. Twenty middle scored utterances were selected. Results A 2 gender of the rater (woman, man) x 2 types of instruction condition (ironic, sincere) repeated-measures ANOVA was performed on the ratings of the extent to which the target utterance was ironic. The results showed a main effect of the production instruction (F (1,124) = 1886.202; p < 0.0001) meaning that the degree of irony was judged higher when the context was produced under ironic instruction (M = 5.855 ± 0.070) than under sincere instruction (M = 1.880 ± 0.067). No main effect of gender was found (F (1,124) = 1.663; p > 0.05). The gender x type of instruction condition interaction was significant (F (1,124) = 12.293; p < 0.001), showing that for stimuli from the ironic instruction condition women (M = 6.081 ± 0.090) judged target utterances more ironic than men (M = 5.629 ± 0.107) did (p <0.002), while for stimuli from the sincere instruction condition such difference did not exist (p > 0.05) (cf. Figure 2). Discussion The main results showed that when the stimuli were ironic – produced in the ironic instruction condition, women rated stimuli as more ironic than men did, while such difference did not exist for the sincere stimuli – produced in the sincere instruction condition. In addition, as expected, irony was judged higher for the stimuli obtained from the ironic instruction condition compared to those from the sincere. Our study, supporting Holtgraves (1991) which showed that women are more likely to interpret a statement as indirect than men, pointed out a discrepancy between production tasks, showing no impact of gender (Bowes & Katz, 2011) while others showing that men produce sarcasm more often than women (Gibbs, 2000), and task requiring participant to judge the degree of irony. According to some research (Campbell & Katz, 2012; Utsumi, 2000), irony conveys negative tension, negative emotions or attitudes such disappointment, anger or reproach. We also know from the literature that women recognize better and more rapidly emotions than men, such difference may be more important for negative emotion such as anger (see Christov-Moore et al., 2014 for a review). It could be that when asked to rate the degree of irony of a statement, women would be more sensitive than men to the negative tension conveyed by irony.

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Figure 2
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References

Bowes, A., & Katz, A. (2011). When Sarcasm Stings. Discourse Processes, 48(4), 215‑236.
Campbell, J. D., & Katz, A. N. (2012). Are there necessary conditions for inducing a sense of sarcastic irony? Discourse Processes, 49:6, 459‑480.
Christov-Moore, L., Simpson, E. A., Coudé, G., Grigaityte, K., Iacoboni, M., & Ferrari, P. F. (2014). Empathy: Gender effects in brain and behavior. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 46, 604‑627.
Colston, H. L. (2005). Social and Cultural Influences on Figurative and Indirect Language. In Figurative language comprehension: Social and cultural influences (N.J: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, p. 99‑130). Mahwah: Colston, H. L., & Katz, A. N.
Colston, H. L., & Lee, S. Y. (2004). Gender differences in verbal irony use. Metaphor and Symbol, 19(4), 289–306.
Gibbs, R. W. J. (2000). Irony in talk among friends. Metaphor and Symbol, 15, 5‑27.
Holtgraves, T. (1991). Interpreting Questions and Replies: Effects of Face-Threat, Question Form, and Gender. Social Psychology Quarterly, 54(1), 15-24.
Pexman, P. M., Ferretti, T. R., & Katz, A. N. (2000). Discourse factors that influence on-line reading of meta- phor and irony. Discourse Processes, (29), 201–222.
Utsumi, A. (2000). Verbal irony as implicit display of ironic environment: Distinguishing ironic utterances from nonirony. Journal of Pragmatics, (32), 1777–1806.

Keywords: Irony comprehension, gender, pragmatics, context, extralinguistic factors

Conference: XPRAG.it 2018 - Second Experimental Pragmatics in Italy Conference, Pavia, Italy, 30 May - 1 Jun, 2018.

Presentation Type: Poster or Oral

Topic: Experimental Pragmatics

Citation: Rivière E and Champagne-Lavau M (2018). Does gender have an impact on irony judgment?. Front. Psychol. Conference Abstract: XPRAG.it 2018 - Second Experimental Pragmatics in Italy Conference. doi: 10.3389/conf.fpsyg.2018.73.00003

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Received: 15 May 2018; Published Online: 14 Dec 2018.

* Correspondence: Mrs. Elora Rivière, Aix-Marseille Université, CNRS, LPL, Marseille, France, elora.riviere@gmail.com