Transcript
Turns out Instagrammers think they're better judges of humor than TikTokers, based on the hundreds of responses to my last video. I asked you all to rate how funny you thought these two jokes were, and then rate yourself on how good a judge of humor you thought you were, where 50 was same as an average college kid. And no, I didn't come up with these jokes, I took them from a 1999 study on the Dunning Kruger effect, where the researchers got eight professional comedians to rate jokes on a scale of one to 11. It's a riddle, not a joke. But that was sort of the point. The eight comedians gave it an average rating of 1.3 out of 11. Ticktokers gave it a 1.9, with very few going above three. And Instagrammers also gave it a 1.9. But for the second joke, things got more interesting. TikTokers averaged a 3.34 out of 11, and Instagram was 3.45. Basically the same, with 90% of you being hypercritical and giving it a 1. But while Instagramers had a pretty smooth decline in rating, the TikTokers showed a bit more polarization, with 4, 6, and 7 and being more common than 2 and 3. What about the professional comedians? Clearly, there's been a generational gap, or y'all just think any joke told by me is dead boring, because their average rating for joke number two, just from reading it back in 1999, was a whopping 9.6 out of 11. Maybe the internet has spoiled us. But here's what I find fascinating. When I asked you guys to rate what you think your ability is to recognize, what's funny compared to an average college student, the most common range of answer from TikTokers was a nice and humble 44 to 55th percentile, with the overall average being 57%. Only 54% of people thought they were above average. But on Instagram, the most common answer range was 77 to 88th percentile, with the overall average being 66% and 69% thought they were above average. In case you're wondering, here's the demographic breakdown for the post on Instagram, even gender split, and here it is for TikTok. 63% male. Let me know your theories in the comments.
Additional notes
Replying to @Silver Is Just Fruity Black. The spreadsheet caption contains a longer Dunning-Kruger analysis and names the paper below.
References
- Unskilled and unaware of it: How difficulties in recognizing one's own incompetence lead to inflated self-assessments - DOI: 10.1037/0022-3514.77.6.1121.