The differential effects of humor on three scientific issues: global warming, artificial intelligence, and microbiomes

ABSTRACT

Humor is widespread in communication and its use in the context of science is no exception. Although science jokes are pervasive on social media, we are only beginning to understand the mechanisms through which humor affects people’s attitudes, opinions, and perceptions of scientific topics. Here, we add to our understanding of how funny science content influences attitude formation and behavioral intentions; these results can help communicators make strategic decisions related to humor’s use in real-world practice. Extending recent work in science communication, this study aims to understand the conditional nature of the mechanism by which funny images about three different scientific topics, combined with verbal humor, affects people’s social media engagement intentions by eliciting mirth. Our results offer evidence that choices about which humor types to employ matter when it comes to communicating scientific topics. For two of the three topics, artificial intelligence and microbiomes, exposure to different humor types resulted in different levels of mirth and humor’s effect on engagement intentions was moderated by respondents’ need for humor. However, humor did not have the same effect on global warming engagement intentions. Our findings have implications for the practice of, training, and scholarship in science communication.

KEYWORDS:

• Science humor
• engagement
• global warming
• artificial intelligence
• microbiomes

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers who generously provided detailed feedback on this manuscript and Dr. John Cook (Monash University), who illustrated the stimuli materials.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available on OSF (https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/8D9A7).

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1 Another example is Improbotics, a ‘tech-infused improvised theatre and comedy show and a live Turing test-based scientific experiment’ (https://improbotics.org/), in which an artificial intelligence-based chatbot performs in the show and attempts to pass as human.

2 We use the term ‘topic’ and ‘issue’ interchangeably to refer to the scientific context of the joke in our experiment. The issues/topics used in this study are (i) global warming, (ii) artificial intelligence (AI); and (iii) microbiomes.

3 Google Trends is a website that analyzes the popularity of top search queries in Google Search (https://trends.google.com/).

4 Respondents were asked how well informed they believed themselves to be (1 = ‘Not at all informed,’ 7 = ‘Very informed’) about global warming (M = 4.87, SD = 1.68), artificial intelligence (M = 4.24, SD = 1.82), and microbiomes (M = 3.19, SD = 1.96). We used the Friedman test to determine whether perceived familiarity differed between issues as the data were not normally distributed. The results show a significant difference in perceived familiarity between issues (χ²(2) = 4765.7, p < .001). Wilcoxon pairwise comparisons revealed significant differences between each pair of items (global warming vs. artificial intelligence: Mean difference = 0.63, p < .001; global warming vs. microbiomes: Mean difference = 1.68, p < .001; artificial intelligence vs. microbiomes: Mean difference = 1.05, p < .001). Similarly, we measured respondent’s factual knowledge levels with eight indicators for each topic: global warming (M = 4.58, SD = 1.69), artificial intelligence (M = 4.41, SD = 1.83), and microbiomes (M = 3.88, SD = 2.06). A repeated measures ANOVA revealed significant differences in knowledge across issues (F(2, 6649) = 84.4, p < .001) and the Tukey post hoc comparisons revealed significant differences between each set of items (global warming vs. artificial intelligence: Mean difference = 0.17, p < .01; global warming vs. microbiomes: Mean difference = 0.70, p < .001; artificial intelligence vs. microbiomes: Mean difference = 0.53, p < .001).

5 For example, the weekly late-night news show, Full Frontal with Samantha Bee, uses satire in this segment highlighting climate change’s effects on Tangier Island, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZoVYl9ltcA.

6 A beta version of PROCESS 3.5 is available for use with R.

7 It is worth noting that the trend of the interactive effect for the issue of global warming is similar to that of AI and microbiomes.

Additional information

Funding

This material is based on work supported by the National Science Foundation under Grant DRL-1906864. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.