Exploring the consistency and value of humour style profiles

ABSTRACT

Establishing generalisable humour style profiles promises to have significant value for educational, clinical, and occupational application. However, previous research investigating such profiles has thus far presented inconsistent results. To determine the generalisability and value of humour style profiles, a large and geographically diverse examination of humour styles was conducted through a cross-sectional questionnaire methodology involving 863 participants from across three world regions. Findings identify inconsistencies in the humour style profiles across countries tested and the extant literature, possibly indicative of cultural differences in the behavioural expression of trait humour. Furthermore, when directly compared, humour types, rather than humour styles, consistently provide the greatest predictive value for friendship and well-being outcomes. As such, with respect to both consistency and value, capturing humour style profiles appears to represent a relatively reductionist approach to appreciating the nuances in the use and consequences of humour.

KEYWORDS:

• Humour
• humour styles
• cluster analysis
• culture
• #registeredreport

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Open science statement

The current study was pre-registered (https://osf.io/9kjp8) and has been published as a Registered Report. Ethical approval, study materials, raw (anonymised), summary and meta-data, and analysis code, are all publicly accessible on the Open Science Framework (https://osf.io/2gsmk).

Contributions (CreDiT)

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Supplementary material

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Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.