“I hear you like bad girls? I’m bad at everything”: a British-Spanish cross-cultural analysis of humour as a self-presentation strategy in Tinder profiles

Abstract

This article explores humour employed as a self-presentation device in the biography section of Tinder profiles belonging to heterosexual users (male and female) in their 20s based in Spain and the United Kingdom. The main purpose of this investigation is to find out if male or female users are more prone to resorting to humour in their Tinder profiles and if the culture within which this interaction takes place also affects the frequency of use of humorous remarks. More specifically, we intend to answer the following research questions: (i) To what extent does gender influence the use of humour as an online self-presentation strategy?, (ii) To what extent does the users’ cultural context play a role in the frequency and way humour is employed? To that purpose, a total of 455 Tinder profiles from both Spanish (224) and UK (231) users was gathered with the help of a bot, Tinderbotz, and it was then analysed quantitatively and qualitatively with the assistance of the software program Atlas.ti. The results show that UK users favour humour as a self-presentation strategy in a significantly higher percentage than their Spanish counterparts, independently of their gender. Thus, while Spanish-speakers may regard humour as a risky mechanism that can backfire, UK users embrace it as part of the Anglo-Saxon ethos of not taking oneself too seriously.