Do humour and threat work well together?

Abstract

Using humour to communicate threatening information in advertising has often been observed in practice, but seldom been tested in research. Integrating the humour and threat persuasion literature, the current research tested the effects of humorous threat persuasion and need for cognition (NFC) as a measure of one’s processing motivation and capacity. A significant three-way interaction between humour, threat level and NFC emerged where low-NFC participants responded more positively to the no-humour condition than the humour condition with low threat, and more positively to the humour condition than the no-humour condition in the high-threat advertisement. The opposite was observed for high-NFC participants. Implications for both theory and practice are provided.