Abstract
Humor ratings are provided for 4,997 English words collected from 821 participants using an online crowd-sourcing platform. Each participant rated 211 words on a scale from 1 (humorless) to 5 (humorous). To provide for comparisons across norms, words were chosen from a set common to a number of previously collected norms (e.g., arousal, valence, dominance, concreteness, age of acquisition, and reaction time). The complete dataset provides researchers with a list of humor ratings and includes information on gender, age, and educational differences. Results of analyses show that the ratings have reliability on a par with previous ratings and are not well predicted by existing norms.
Highlights
The appreciation of humor is a fundamental, albeit mysterious, part of human cognition
What makes one thing funnier than another? And what makes some topics inviolable in relation to humor? To help develop this research, we provide the first set of humor norms for a large collection of 4,997 common words
Ratings were collected for 4,997 words, with each word rated by at least 15 participants
Summary
The appreciation of humor is a fundamental, albeit mysterious, part of human cognition. Darwin (1872) called humor Btickling the mind.^ Thomas Hobbes (1840) referred to it as a feeling of Bsudden glory.^ These represent a selection from a long list of efforts to provide a theory of humor (reviewed in Hurley, Dennett, & Adams, 2011; Keith-Spiegel, 1972; Wyer & Collins, 1992) These include biological theories – such as the DarwinHecker hypothesis that humor is a cognitive analogue of physical tickling (Fridlund & Loftis, 1990; Harris & Christenfeld, 1997); superiority theories, such as Hobbes notion of Bsudden glory^ over another individual or one’s previous self (Hobbes, 1840); release theories, such as that proposed by Spencer (1860) and later Freud (1928), that humor is a means of reducing excessive arousal; incongruity-resolution theories (Shultz, 1976; Suls, 1972), perhaps first noted by Kant (1790/1914), in his observation that BIn everything that is to excite a lively convulsive laugh there must be something absurd,^ and later developed by Schopenhauer (for an overview, see Roeckelein, 2006), who suggested the Bludicrous^ required a Bcontrast...between representation of perception and abstract representations.^ Still further theories have focused on the adaptive value of humor as an error correction mechanism and faulty logic detection system (Minsky, 1981), most recently and thoroughly developed by Hurley, Dennett, and Adams (2011). A similar version of this theory has been called the benign violation theory (McGraw & Warren, 2010), which suggests a person must realize the stimuli is incongruous with their expectations (violation), and that this incongruity is not harmful given the context (benign)
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