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Just kidding? Exploring the role of traditional versus counter-traditional gender role jokes on gender identity threat

  • Ipek Guvensoy

    Ipek Guvensoy is a PhD candidate at Sabancı University, her research interests include group dynamics, social identity, intergroup contact, prejudice, social cognition and close relationships.

     ORCID logo EMAIL logo     , Büşra Kaplan

    Büşra Kaplan is a graduate student in Social Psychology at Sabancı University. Her research interests include identity conflict and collective action, and environmental psychology.

     ORCID logo     , Sabahat Cigdem Bagci

    Sabahat Cigdem Bagci is a Professor at Sabancı University and her research interests include intergroup contact and cross-group friendships, prejudice and discrimination, social identity, collective action, collective narcissism identity processes in vegetarianism and psychological well-being.

     ORCID logo     , Irem Sakarya

    Irem Sakarya is a master’s student in Social Psychology Program at Sabancı University. Her primary research interests include discrimination, attitude change, and human-robot interactions.

     ORCID logo     , Esra Kamacı

    Esra Kamacı is a graduate student in social psychology at Istanbul University, and she is a researcher at Ibn Haldun University. She also works as a laboratory assistant at the Trauma and Resilience Laboratory. Her research interests include moral psychology, intergroup relations, and psychological resilience.

     ORCID logo     , Irem Kuyucu

    Irem Kuyucu is a graduate student in Psychology at Sabancı University. Her research focuses on sociolinguistics, social judgment, and stereotyping.

     ORCID logo     , Duygu Yurt

    Duygu Yurt is a graduate student in Social Psychology at Sabancı University where she studies collective action, threat perceptions, and intergroup emotions.

     ORCID logo     , Selen Akay

    Selen Akay is a recent graduate of the psychology master’s program at Sabancı University in Turkey. Her research interests focus on attitudes toward technologies such as robots and artificial intelligence, and how these technologies influence individuals’ lives and relationships.

         and Emrah Kahraman

    Emrah Kahraman is a master’s student in Clinical, Social and Intercultural Psychology Program at the University of Padua. His research focuses on workplace diversity, gender studies, and the social dynamics of everyday interactions, with particular interest in how group identities shape relational processes.

     ORCID logo
Published/Copyright: August 27, 2025
HUMOR
From the journal HUMOR Volume 38 Issue 4

Abstract

While traditional gender roles have been examined in the context of online communication, less is known about the implications of encountering counter-traditional gender roles (e.g., depicting men as caring and women as independent) on social media. We investigated participants’ perceived gender identity threat upon exposure to traditional versus counter-traditional gender role jokes that targeted either men or women. An online experiment (N = 265) using a 2 (content: traditional versus counter-traditional gender roles) by 2 (joke’s target gender: men versus women) by 2 (participant’s gender: man versus woman) mixed design demonstrated that overall, jokes targeting women elicited greater identity threat and women perceived greater identity threat than men. Moreover, the three-way interactions showed that women, in particular, perceived greater identity threat from traditional gender role jokes targeting women. The current study highlights the damaging role of the spread of traditional gender roles through humor, particularly for women’s gender identities.

Keywords: gender roles; traditional; humor; identity threat; social media
Corresponding author: Ipek Guvensoy, Department of Psychology, Sabanci University, Orta Mahalle, Üniversite Cd. No: 27, 34956, Tuzla/İstanbul, Türkiye, E-mail:

About the authors

Ipek Guvensoy

Ipek Guvensoy is a PhD candidate at Sabancı University, her research interests include group dynamics, social identity, intergroup contact, prejudice, social cognition and close relationships.

Büşra Kaplan

Büşra Kaplan is a graduate student in Social Psychology at Sabancı University. Her research interests include identity conflict and collective action, and environmental psychology.

Sabahat Cigdem Bagci

Sabahat Cigdem Bagci is a Professor at Sabancı University and her research interests include intergroup contact and cross-group friendships, prejudice and discrimination, social identity, collective action, collective narcissism identity processes in vegetarianism and psychological well-being.

Irem Sakarya

Irem Sakarya is a master’s student in Social Psychology Program at Sabancı University. Her primary research interests include discrimination, attitude change, and human-robot interactions.

Esra Kamacı

Esra Kamacı is a graduate student in social psychology at Istanbul University, and she is a researcher at Ibn Haldun University. She also works as a laboratory assistant at the Trauma and Resilience Laboratory. Her research interests include moral psychology, intergroup relations, and psychological resilience.

Irem Kuyucu

Irem Kuyucu is a graduate student in Psychology at Sabancı University. Her research focuses on sociolinguistics, social judgment, and stereotyping.

Duygu Yurt

Duygu Yurt is a graduate student in Social Psychology at Sabancı University where she studies collective action, threat perceptions, and intergroup emotions.

Selen Akay

Selen Akay is a recent graduate of the psychology master’s program at Sabancı University in Turkey. Her research interests focus on attitudes toward technologies such as robots and artificial intelligence, and how these technologies influence individuals’ lives and relationships.

Emrah Kahraman

Emrah Kahraman is a master’s student in Clinical, Social and Intercultural Psychology Program at the University of Padua. His research focuses on workplace diversity, gender studies, and the social dynamics of everyday interactions, with particular interest in how group identities shape relational processes.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Groupsy Lab assistants Ece Gürsoy and Büşra Neziroğlu for their help in this work especially in data collection.

  1. Research ethics: Approval was obtained from the ethics committee of Sabanci University. Ethics approval protocol number: FASS-2024-30.

  2. Informed consent: Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

  3. Author contributions: All authors contributed to the study conception and design, and data collection. BK, IG and IS analyzed the data. IG and BK reported statistical results and wrote the results section. SCB oversaw the statistical analysis, figures, tables and interpretation of the results. All authors partially contributed to drafting the manuscript for specific sections, including the first author IG contributing to the drafting of all sections throughout the manuscript. SCB and IG edited and revised the full manuscript. All authors read and approved the final version of the paper.

  4. Competing interests: The authors have no relevant financial or non-financial interests to disclose.

  5. Research funding: No funding was received for conducting this study.

  6. Data availability: This research was not pre-registered. The data used in the research are available by emailing: .

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Supplementary Material

This article contains supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/humor-2025-0042).

Received: 2025-01-27
Accepted: 2025-06-30
Published Online: 2025-08-27
Published in Print: 2025-10-27

© 2025 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

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https://doi.org/10.1515/humor-2025-0042
Keywords for this article
gender roles; traditional; humor; identity threat; social media

Articles in the same Issue

  1. Frontmatter
  2. Full Length Articles
  3. Five theses on humor literacy in the public sphere
  4. More engagement equals more persuasion? How entertainment experiences predict attitudinal effects of satirical news articles
  5. Just kidding? Exploring the role of traditional versus counter-traditional gender role jokes on gender identity threat
  6. Maurophobia through racist humor in Spanish social media: a multimodal critical discourse analysis of the neologism ‘Youthland’
  7. “That kind of pants?!”: designedly ambiguous deadpan delivery of a possibly nonserious turn in multiparty Japanese conversation
  8. What’s in a pun? Assessing the relationship between phonological distance and perceived funniness of punning jokes
  9. Book Review
  10. David Shoemaker. 2024. Wisecracks: Humor and Morality in Everyday Life. pp. 204. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ISBN: 9780226832982. $25.00
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