Investigating the role of dark personality traits in how people appreciate, share, and censor black humour in online settings

Abstract

ABSTRACT People find humour in the darkest and most tragic situations. However, there is remarkable interpersonal variability when it comes to setting the so-called limits of humour. We examine how the Dark Tetrad personality traits (DT4; Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychopathy, and sadism) relate to responses to black humour jokes in online settings. A community sample of 745 adults completed the Short Dark Triad and the Assessment of Sadistic Personality inventories before rating a set of ‘black’ and neutrally humourous jokes in terms of their (a) appreciation (fun/offence), (b) likelihood of sharing, and (c) censoring them on social networks (e.g. Twitter/Facebook). After controlling for common variance, everyday sadism emerged as the strongest DT4 predictor of black humour preferences. This type of dark personality was uniquely associated with higher fun and sharing, and lower offence and censorship of black humour jokes. Machiavellianism was related to negative levels of black humour censorship and offence, whereas the opposite associations were observed for narcissism. Yet, the DT4 only showed rather modest amounts of shared variance regarding responses to black humour jokes, suggesting that interpersonal callousness is insufficient to account for the complexity of black humour interposal variability. We discuss the findings with respect to earlier humour literature.