Motivated Cognition and Humor Enjoyment: Whom should you tell which jokes when

1
Motivated Cognition and Humor Enjoyment Whom
should you tell which jokes when?

• Adrian Wojcik Warsaw U
• Ilan Roziner Tel Aviv U

2
Humor is a serious matter

• Improves mood and reduces state anxiety (Moran,
  1995)
• Increases pain tolerance (Zweyer et al., 2004)
• Facilitates social interaction (Grammer, 1990)
• Promotes group identity (Holmes and Marra, 2002)
• Helps coping with oppression (Morreall, 1997)
• Ca. 111,000,000,000 invested in humorous ads
  annually worldwide!

3
Incongruity theory of humor

• Joke structure
• Set-up (What is gray, has four legs, and a
  trunk?)
• Punch-line (A mouse on vacation)
• Two stages of joke comprehension (Suls, 1972)
• Incongruity identification (why vacation???)
• Incongruity resolution (oh, trunk has two
  meanings!!!)

4
Cognitive effort in humor apprehension (Wyer,
1992)
5
What determines cognitive effort?

• The stimulus
• The person
• The situation

6
The STIMULUS(some jokes contain more information
than others)

• Information availability
• What's the definition of a minor second?
• Two violists playing in unison.
• Information accessibility
• What's the difference between a viola and an
  onion?
• No one cries when you cut up a viola.

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The PERSON(some people enjoy more information
than others)

• Need for Cognition (Cacioppo and Petty, 1982)
• stable individual difference
• tendency to engage in and enjoy effortful
  cognitive activity
• measured with a short questionnaire (e.g., I
  would prefer complex to simple problems I like
  tasks that require little thought once I've
  learned them reversed)

8
The SITUATION(some situations allow to process
more information than others)

• Need for Cognitive Closure (Kruglanski, 1989)
• Individuals' desire for a definite answer on
  some topic, any answer as opposed to confusion
  and ambiguity
• Operationalized as
• time pressure
• fatigue
• environmental noise
• task unattractiveness, etc.

9
The experiments

• 1. Need for Cognition measurement
• 2. Need for Closure manipulation
• Study 1a fatigue (half hour of a Stroop task)
• Study 1b circadian rhythms (morning, evening
  sessions)
• 3. Stimuli two-line jokes, pretested for
  comprehensibility
• 4. Accessibility manipulation
• Study 1a subliminally priming with the
  punch-line word
• Study 1b pretesting jokes for accessibility (RT
  to get it)
• 5. EnJOYment measurement
• using JOYstick approach/avoidance movements
• recording facial expressions and rating them
  for mirth

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The expected results pattern
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Conclusions

• To be a successful joker, estimate the cognitive
  load in telling
• WHICH joke
• to WHOM
• and WHEN

12
The best joke in the world

• Richard Wiseman (2002) U of Hertfordshire, UK
• 40,000 jokes
• 2,000,000 ratings
• http//www.laughlab.co.uk/summary.html