Abstract
To what extent an individual holds an essentialist belief about a sense of humor may influence their use of humor and subsequently subjective well-being. We conducted three studies with Chinese adults to examine the effect of such Belief in Essentialism about Sense of Humor (BESH) on people’s intention to use humor and subjective happiness. Study 1 (n = 333) manipulated BESH and found that high BESH reduced individuals’ likelihood of using humor, especially in negative social contexts. Study 2 (n = 240) showed that the high BESH predicted lower subjective happiness through a low intention to use humor in negative contexts. Study 3 (n = 100) used an online intervention paradigm to manipulate BESH and found that intervention in BESH enhanced the subjective happiness of participants who were coping with COVID-19. The research highlights the importance of essentialist beliefs about humor and suggests ways of improving happiness by reducing such beliefs.
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Data Availability
The data that support the findings of this study are available in “figshare” at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.23735274.
Notes
A separate sample (N = 60) showed that the same manipulation led to higher BESH scores in the high BESH condition, than in the low BESH condition, t(58) = 7.81, p < .001, Cohen’s d = 2.02, with no differences in the understandability, credibility, and persuasiveness between the two conditions, t(58)s ≤ 1.39, ps ≥ 0.169.
All scenarios were pretested. Pretest participants (N = 50) rated how positive or negative each scenario (1 = completely negative, 7 = completely positive) was. Scenarios in positive contexts were rated as more positive (M = 5.34, SD = 0.27) than those in the negative contexts (M = 2.29, SD = 0.47), t (49) = 42.22, p < .001.
The sense of humor did not vary between the two conditions, F (1, 331) = 0.05, p = .830.
Including the sense of humor as the covariate did not change the pattern of the results.
More details can be found in the online supplementary material.
In Addition, we have run a commonality analysis to test the shared variance of variables. The results indicated that the two predictors together account for 20.9% of the variance in subjective happiness, in which the unique effect of BESH is 0.001% and that of intention to use humor is 20.8%, indicating that, when both factors are considered at the same time, the intention to use humor, rather than BESH, plays an important role in predicting subjective happiness
The same pattern holds when sense of humor is added as a covariate in the model.
We originally aimed to recruit 300 participants, but due to the impact of COVID-19, only 162 were eventually recruited.
Participants completed the BESH scale on a Five-point scale (1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree).
Athletic ability is not valued very much among Chinese people.
The average time participants spent on the intervention task was 17.33 min, which did not differ significantly between the control (17.03 min) and experimental (17.59 min) conditions. t (103) = 0.31, p = .76.
Including the sense of humor as the covariate or the measurements of time 1 as covariates (BESH_1 and sense of humor_1) did not change the pattern of the results.
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This work was supported by grants from the Chinese National Natural Science Foundation (32271125) to Yubo Hou.
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Cao, Y., Liu, Y., Hou, Y. et al. Essentializing Humor and Implications for Pursuing Happiness. J Happiness Stud 25, 11 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-024-00717-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10902-024-00717-y