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Making of an In-Joke: Humor Appreciation as an Ingratiation Strategy Following Ostracism

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Abstract

Humans have a fundamental need to belong, and when thwarted, engage in behaviors to facilitate reaffiliation. Humor, a uniquely human trait, evolved as a means of facilitating rapport between individuals and fostering stronger interpersonal bonds through the elicitation of positive affect and activation of reward centers in the brain. We predicted that those experiencing acute ostracism would rate others’ attempts at humor (i.e., jokes) as funnier than those experiencing social inclusion, particularly low-quality jokes, as a means of ingratiating themselves to new opportunities for affiliation. Men and women were either included or ostracized via Cyberball and rated male and female targets’ funniness and likeability, half of which were paired with a funny joke and the other half an unfunny joke. Excluded men rated women as funnier than did included men, even when women’s jokes were categorically unfunny. Collectively, these results suggest that humor appreciation may be a means of facilitating social affiliation following rejection; however, this effect seems specific to men.

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Notes

  1. Although the jokes we classified as funny for the main study had ratings that tended to stay around the midpoint of the scale, they remained nonetheless funnier than the jokes we classified as unfunny. Furthermore, such tendency for so-called funny jokes to stay around the midpoint is typical of funny jokes in other experiments (see Chan et al. 2013).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, The University of Southern Mississippi, 118 College Drive #5025, Hattiesburg, MS, 39406, USA

    Donald F. Sacco, Mitch Brown, Haley D. May & Mary Medlin

Authors
  1. Donald F. Sacco
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  2. Mitch Brown
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  3. Haley D. May
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  4. Mary Medlin
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Donald F. Sacco.

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On behalf of all authors, the corresponding author states that there is no conflict of interest.

Appendix

Appendix

Funny Jokes

  1. 1.

    Cremation: My final hope for a smoking hot body!

  2. 2.

    What is Mozart doing right now? Decomposing.

  3. 3.

    “Doctor, I’ve broken my arm in several places.” “Well, don’t go to those places.”

  4. 4.

    The past, the present, and the future were having an argument. It was tense.

Unfunny Jokes

  1. 1.

    What do you call a tiger with glasses on? A scientist tiger.

  2. 2.

    What is small, grey, and triangular? The shadow of a green triangle!

  3. 3.

    What does a farmer say when he’s looking for his tractor? “Where’s my tractor?”

  4. 4.

    How can you open a banana? With a monkey!

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Sacco, D.F., Brown, M., May, H.D. et al. Making of an In-Joke: Humor Appreciation as an Ingratiation Strategy Following Ostracism. Evolutionary Psychological Science 4, 202–211 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-017-0129-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40806-017-0129-1

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