Facebook makes you funnier
Repeated attempts at humour can persuade strangers you’re a wit
You can tell if someone’s funny — at least, whether they think they are — just by looking at them, according to a new social media study.
In asking strangers to briefly assess visual cues on Facebook users’ profile pages, researchers found humour orientation could be judged just as accurately as more obvious personality traits, such as extroversion. And in a bit of good news for those whose jokes wilt instead of wallop, it didn’t matter whether a person was actually funny; they just had to make the attempt.
“Strangers collectively saw people as they saw themselves, at a rate well above chance,” said Jeffrey A. Hall, associate professor of communication at the University of Kansas. “It was pretty extraordinary.”
Alongside co-author Natalie Pennington, Hall recruited 100 Facebook users and asked them to assess their personal orientation toward humour: for instance, whether they regularly told jokes in groups, or if people tended to laugh when they shared funny stories.
Those people’s online profiles were then separately evaluated by strangers, who spent 15 minutes perusing the users’ main pages, eight most recent profile pictures, information pages, recent wall posts and status updates. What the observers saw provided the singular basis for their conclusions about whether or not the Facebook member was humour-oriented.
“We didn’t code for how funny they were; we coded for whether they were trying to be funny,” said Hall.
Of 53 cues analyzed, the areas most likely to tip a casual observer to someone’s sense of humour – and were indeed related to that person’s humour – were their profile pictures (specifically, whether they were funny, and whether any pictured friends seemed affable); their status updates (were they humorous, were they non-political, and did they discuss their romantic relationship?); and their wall activity (number of Likes and number of unique friends’ comments on posts).
“They’re not making zingy one-liners.”
JEFFREY A. HALL
Of the latter, Hall reports that repeated attempts at wit conveyed a humorous impression to observers regardless of audience response, but that the responses of Facebook friends appeared to bolster the users’ jocular self-presentation.
“If you want to appear to be a funny person on Facebook, try a lot — in a lot of places — and people will tend to believe you’re funny without any other evidence of who you are,” concluded Hall, whose study will be published in the next issue of HUMOUR: the International Journal of Humour Research.
Importantly, the study validates claims that online identities are extensions of our offline self. It also reveals that site-users who prize their ability to entertain tend to do so “in an utterly mundane way,” such as the person who posted: “There is NOTHING stickier, more durable, and harder to scrape away than day-old fruity pebbles ... they should build the next space shuttle out of them.”
“They’re not making zingy one-liners or trying to be professional comedians,” said Hall. “They’re just talking about their daily lives.”