Right-wing authoritarians aren't very funny: RWA, personality, and creative humor production

Abstract

Right-wing authoritarianism (RWA) has well-known links with humor appreciation, such as enjoying jokes that target deviant groups, but less is known about RWA and creative humor production—coming up with funny ideas oneself. A sample of 186 young adults completed a measure of RWA, the HEXACO-100, and 3 humor production tasks that involved writing funny cartoon captions, creating humorous definitions for quirky concepts, and completing joke stems with punchlines. The humor responses were scored by 8 raters and analyzed with many-facet Rasch models. Latent variable models found that RWA had a large, significant effect on humor production (β = −0.47 [−0.65, −0.30], p < .001): responses created by people high in RWA were rated as much less funny. RWA's negative effect on humor was smaller but still significant (β = −0.25 [−0.49, −0.01], p = .044) after controlling for Openness to Experience (β = 0.39 [0.20, 0.59], p < .001) and Conscientiousness (β = −0.21 [−0.41, −0.02], p = .029). Taken together, the findings suggest that people high in RWA just aren't very funny.