Prejudice Reduction through Humor

• In Event: Online Hate, Toxicity, Intolerant Discourse, and Its Political Effects

Abstract

Humor is ubiquitous in online hate spaces, often deployed as a tactic to mainstream the rightwing extremist worldview and rhetoric. In addition to serving a mainstreaming function, hate spaces online provide a platform for extremist groups to build and maintain a sense of community and strengthen identity with the in-group, often by magnifying the “otherness” of an outgroup via ridicule. If humor is an effective tool for recruiting and inculcating individuals into extremist, hateful worldviews, can humor also be utilized to reduce such prejudiced attitudes? Academic research has shown that one set of interventions, analogic perspective-shifting and perspective-getting, are particularly effective at increasing identification with out-groups and reducing prejudice (Kalla and Broockman 2020). Building on this body of literature, we test a novel extension of an analogic perspective-getting narrative: the use of humor. Humor itself often requires individuals to mentally shift to other perspectives (Apter, 1982; Wyer & Collins, 1992; Hampes, 2010), which may facilitate individuals’ ability to put themselves in others’ shoes. Humor may also complement and even enhance analogic perspective-getting’s capacity to reduce prejudiced attitudes by eliciting a cognitive-affective shift that can create conditions that make individuals more receptive to messages that they may otherwise resist. These conditions include humor’s capacity to reduce counter-arguing, elicit a positive affect shift, reduce cognitive burden, and diminish the sense of threat. To test this, we conducted an online survey experiment in which participants were randomly assigned to either the control or one of two treatment conditions, a humorous or serious version of an analogic perspective-getting narrative. These treatment conditions each feature a video of a person speaking directly to the camera, relaying a first-person account of an experience with antisemitism. The same individual will describe the same experience, but in one video the narrative will employ humor and the other version will be serious. (The control features a placebo video.) In addition to testing the relative effectiveness of the humorous and serious versions of this narrative at reducing various types of antisemitic attitudes, we also explore whether the humorous version was relatively more effective than the serious version among specific subsets of the population, who may otherwise be more resistant to messages intended to reduce prejudiced attitudes.

Authors

• Catie Snow Bailard, George Washington University

• Rebekah Tromble, George Washington University

• Andrew I Thompson, University of Pennsylvania