All joking aside? Comparing the effects of a humorous vs. a non-humorous message strategy in building organization–public relationships and community resilience

ABSTRACT

Communication scholars have studied the persuasive power of humor messages, but research provides mixed results. Also, the literature has been slow in demonstrating the practical effects of humorous messages on desired outcomes (e.g., organization–public relationships). Through an online experiment in the context of weather messages with samples of U.S. adults residing in the Southeastern U.S. (N = 209), we compared a humorous social media message designed to build relationships with the public to a non-humorous message in predicting OPRs and perceived community resilience when there is no high-impact weather on the horizon. Compared to a humorous message, a non-humorous message appeared to be more effective in increasing perceived community resilience and three dimensions of positive OPRs – trust, control mutuality, and commitment. The effects were more robust for community members with low to moderate levels of weather salience (i.e., the psychological value and importance that people have for the weather).

KEYWORDS:

• Quiet weather
• risk communication
• message strategy
• humor
• quantitative methods

Acknowledgements

We thank the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) for funding this research through the VORTEX-SE Program (Award NA20OAR4590454). The views and conclusions contained in this paper are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as necessarily representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of NOAA.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 We developed the messages in collaboration with four NWS meteorologists to ensure ecological validity of the stimuli. Using analysis of variance (ANOVA), we performed a manipulation check to ensure that the experiment design reflected the intended humorous vs. non-humorous message manipulation. As expected, respondents in the humor message condition reported that the local NWS office used a sense of humor in the message (M = 5.99, SD = 2.42) to a higher degree than those in the non-humor message condition (M = 5.29, SD = 2.19), F (1, 207)= 4.83, p = .03.

2 With the interest of whether a particular messaging strategy applies equally to a diverse audience, we ran ANCOVAs to examine the covariates included in our analyses. Results showed that there were no statistical differences in the outcomes by age, sex, or race/ethnicity during quiet weather.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), (NOAA/OAR Office of Weather and Air Quality) [grant number NA20OAR4590454].