Who Finds Benign Moral Violations Amusing?

Abstract

Recently McGraw and Warren put forward the benign-violation hypothesis of humor. One of their key findings was that if a violation could be seen as both wrong and not wrong, i.e. morally ambiguous, then it was more likely to be found amusing. Here we analyze the universality of this type of humor, using survey data from 250 US and 247 Indian workers on the Amazon Turk who filled out the Humor Styles Questionnaire (HSQ) and judged whether four 'benign violation' scenarios and one 'non-benign violation' scenario were amusing, could be seen as wrong, and could be seen as not wrong. On the whole, amusement was much more frequent among Indian respondents, and the difference was greatest for the non-benign scenario. The wrong-and-not-wrong interaction predicted greater amusement for the same scenario that McGraw and Warren tested – but not for the other scenarios, suggesting a dependence on scenarios not covered by the theory. A non-affiliative and aggressive humor style was associated with higher amusement, suggesting that the benign-violation hypothesis deals with a kind of humor that is not central to the affiliative use of humor.