Funny? Think About It! Selective effect of cognitive mechanisms of humour on insight problems

ABSTRACT

The present study aims to elucidate whether insight problem solving could be facilitated by the cognitive component of humour. The authors take interest in whether the logical mechanisms of humour can affect how fast insight problems are solved. To that end, the authors conducted two experiments where participants solved insight problems after watching visual humorous stimuli such as videos and slideshows. The first experiment demonstrated the overall impact of facilitation by humour on insight problem solving; however, it did not show any difference in how particular logical mechanisms of humour affect the solution time of insight problems. The second experiment showed that the cognitive component of humour could selectively affect insight problems whose difficulty stems from different sources. These results suggest that the cognitive component of humour, when operationalised as logical mechanisms and schema switching, contributes to solving insight problems.

KEYWORDS:

• Insight
• humor
• representational change
• chunk decomposition
• constraint relaxation

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study will be openly available in https://osf.io/jgrbu.

Additional information

Funding

The research was supported by Russian Science Foundation, grant 22-18-00358, https://rscf.ru/en/project/22-18-00358/