Humor and Learning

Do we learn more when laughing?  Does humor help, or hinder, learning?

The answer to that second question is -- yes.  Both.  At least according to something called Instructional Humor Processing Theory, which comes out of education research so I'm uncertain as to whether we can safely apply this to, say, whether or not people learn from Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert.  In the study I'm looking at, appropriate humor aids learning, inappropriate humor does not.  The latter includes other-disparaging (I assume saying bad things about other people) humor, the basis of my educational efforts, and offensive humor, also an important aspect of my pedagogical approach.  In other words, clearly I deserve the blame for my students not learning from me.

Can we apply these findings and theory at all to late-night faux news comedy shows?  I don't think so, which is too bad because it's an unanswered question whether humor gets in the way of political learning.  My gut feeling is humor draws attention, which should increase learning, but the laughter kicks in and we actually don't learn as much as we think we learn from the content.  We can only process so much information, and emotion can often get in the way of cognition.

So how do we explain surveys that find positive associations between watching The Daily Show or The Colbert Report and scores on political knowledge?  Cross-sectional data, even with statistical controls, can be awfully misleading.  I'm not saying there isn't a relationship, I'm merely saying we need more careful experiments to really tease this one out.

Sure, It's Funny ...

While doing some reading for my graduate seminar I came across this neat study in Social Science Computer Review (no, not making the name up) that looks at the effects of Internet humor. Ya know, the JibJab Effect.

The set of experiments by Jody Baumgartner (who has done some interesting stuff recently) finds that often humor has a negative relationship with exposure to Internet-based political humor and evaluations about political institutions and actors. But -- there's always a but -- self-effacing humor can have a positive impact on evaluations about a politician. In other words, the JibJab Effect here is positive because it's kinda self-deprecating. Of course it's not really self-deprecating since in this case neither Bush nor Kerry actually performed, but you get the idea.

So what's it all mean? I'm reading a bunch of humor stuff for my class this week, about Colbert and Stewart and even a fascinating case study of a politician's attempt at humor on TV that goes wrong). The basic result is that humor of a negative tenor tends to damage perceptions of our major institutions and political actors, at least a little. And people tend to report lower self efficacy (or internal efficacy, for you polisci types). Nothing much to report on political knowledge, but I suspect humor gets in the way of learning.

Thus we have the two big camps: parody and satire are bad, or they are good. The answer? Probably both. How's that for a PhDweebish fence-riding response?

I do believe satire and parody and humor serve an important role in political communication. The viral nature alone has a function, as well as shared experience. But there are downsides in all of our traditional dependent variables: efficacy, cynicism, trust. Is one worth the other? It doesn't matter, not really, since we have no control over them. I'd put this recent explosion of political humor in the category, to borrow a book title, of amusing ourselves to death.