Yes, I Will Say Something: How Humor Influences Intention to Intervene and How Social Marketing Can Help!

Abstract

Problematic and risky behaviors such as drunk driving, drug taking, and binge drinking are often undertaken in social situations where a bystander could intervene. To date, research has examined neither social marketing’s effect on interveners nor the mechanisms by which that might work. On the basis of reader response theory, we introduce a new concept, comedic reproducibility, defined as the perception that one can reuse stimuli to elicit mirth in others, and we study its role in humorous social advertising for intervening intentions. Our research reports two studies. In Study 1, we explore the route by which affiliative humor style affects intention to intervene via a mediation effect of intervening anxiety. We also examine the interactive influence of comedic reproducibility of the ad and audience affiliative humor style on intervening anxiety. In Study 2, we examine the direct effects of comedic reproducibility on intention to intervene. Results demonstrate that social advertising messages perceived as comedically reproducible provide audiences with a tool they can use in conjunction with their affiliative humor style to stop their friends from behaving dangerously. The findings can be used by social marketers to create and pretest the effectiveness of comedically reproducible campaigns that target intervening.