Loading...
The relative importance of joke and audience characteristics in eliciting amusement
Rosenbusch,Hannes Evans,Anthony M. Zeelenberg,Marcel
Rosenbusch,Hannes
Evans,Anthony M.
Zeelenberg,Marcel
Abstract
The current work estimated the relative importance of joke and audience characteristics for the occurrence of amusement. Much psychological research has focused on stimulus characteristics when searching for sources of funniness. Some researchers have instead highlighted the importance of perceiver characteristics, such as dispositional cheerfulness. Across five preregistered studies (Ns = 118–54,905) with varied stimuli and perceiver samples (website visitors, students, Mechanical Turk and Prolific users), variance-decomposition analyses found that perceiver characteristics account for more variance in funniness ratings than stimulus characteristics. Thus, psychological theories focusing on between-persons differences have a relatively high potential for explaining and predicting humor appreciation (here, funniness ratings). Crucially, perceiver-by-stimulus interactions explained the largest amount of variance, highlighting the importance of fit between joke and audience characteristics when predicting amusement. Implications for humor-appreciation theories and applications are discussed.
Description
Publisher Copyright: © The Author(s) 2022.
Date
2022
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Research Projects
Organizational Units
Journal Issue
Keywords
APPRECIATION, BEHAVIOR, HUMOR STYLES, INDIVIDUAL-DIFFERENCES, LAUGHTER, PERSONALITY, SENSE, SEX, amusement, audience characteristics, funniness, humor, open data, open materials, preregistered, variance decomposition
Citation
Rosenbusch, H, Evans, A M & Zeelenberg, M 2022, 'The relative importance of joke and audience characteristics in eliciting amusement', Psychological Science, vol. 33, no. 9, pp. 1386-1394. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976221098595