Benign Violation Research Articles

The Mixed Blessing of Leader Sense of Humor: Examining Costs and Benefits

Workplace humor is ubiquitous, yet scholars know little about how it affects employees’ behaviors in organizations. We draw on an emerging psychological theory of humor—benign violation theory—to s...

Differentiating what is humorous from what is not.

After 2.5 millennia of philosophical deliberation and psychological experimentation, most scholars have concluded that humor arises from incongruity. We highlight 2 limitations of incongruity theories of humor. First, incongruity is not consistently defined. The literature describes incongruity in at least 4 ways: surprise, juxtaposition, atypicality, and a violation. Second, regardless of definition, incongruity alone does not adequately differentiate humorous from nonhumorous experiences. We suggest revising incongruity theory by proposing that humor arises from a benign violation: something that threatens a person's well-being, identity, or normative belief structure but that simultaneously seems okay. Six studies, which use entertainment, consumer products, and social interaction as stimuli, reveal that the benign violation hypothesis better differentiates humorous from nonhumorous experiences than common conceptualizations of incongruity. A benign violation conceptualization of humor improves accuracy by reducing the likelihood that joyous, amazing, and tragic situations are inaccurately predicted to be humorous. (PsycINFO Database Record

The Frog Test: A Tool for Measuring Humor Theories' Validity and Humor Preferences.

The Frog Test: A Tool for Measuring Humor Theories' Validity and Humor Preferences.

Humor Production and Perceptions of Psychological Health

Funny people — comedians, class clowns, and pranksters — often seem troubled. But are they? Though an argument can be made either way, we suggest that trying to be funny can cause people to seem psychologically unhealthy regardless of their actual psychological health. We derive our predictions from the benign violation theory of humor, which proposes amusement arises from the perception that something is wrong yet okay. Accordingly, acting non-normatively enhances humor as long as the behavior is not too deviant. We present two studies that ask participants to judge storytellers based on the content of their stories. Although stories featuring taboo topics facilitate humor (up to a point) — humorous stories also create the impression that there is something wrong with the storyteller. Importantly, we find that the same storyteller is more likely to be perceived to be psychologically unhealthy when telling a story intended to be funny than when telling a story intended to be otherwise interesting.

“Anti Societies Are Now All the Rage”: Jokes, Criticism, and Violence in Response to the Transformation of American Reform, 1825–1835

Taking a series of popular jokes about fictitious “anti-societies” as its point of departure, this article explores the responses to the transformation of reform in the decade between 1825 and 1835 and places them in the context of social and political change brought about by Evangelicalism and Jacksonian democracy. Rooted in the tradition of the moral reform society, through specialization of its aims, the anti-society seemed to become a democratic pendant of older reform societies and was thought to play a divisive role in local communities. Critics denounced the new societies for their prescriptive character, the prominent role women played, and the “spirit of opposition” they triggered. Contemporaries increasingly understood the evolution of reform culture from the relatively harmonious religious and moral reform societies of the Benevolent Empire of the first quarter of the 19th century to the oppositional and highly contested organizations of radical antislavery and temperance of the 1830s as a serious threat to the social order and the future of the United States. Using the Benign Violation Theory of Humor, this article argues that the American reaction to anti-societies suggests that while they were broadly perceived as a threat to the social order from the late 1820s on, this threat was at first understood to be benign, and thus could be laughed off, while from 1833 on, anti-societies were increasingly regarded as a destructive force, and provoked substantial fears that could justify violent responses as an alternative way to reinforce the “normal” order of things.

The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny

The Humor Code: A Global Search for What Makes Things Funny

What makes things humorous

In a familiar parable, a group of blind men try to discern the shape of an elephant, but each man’s perspective differs depending on whether he’s touching the trunk, tusk, or tail (Fig. 1). After 2,500 years of studying humor, scientists similarly have differing perspectives on what makes things funny (1). We present three common perspectives on humor. Although each is insightful, no one perspective suffices to explain why so many dissimilar things—tickle attacks, foolish behavior, puns, absurdities, and sitcoms—can be humorous. However, integrating the three perspectives into an account of humor as a response to benign violations discerns the whole animal from its parts and thus better explains how laughter and amusement come about.

Humorous Complaining

Although complaints document dissatisfaction, some are also humorous. The article introduces the concept of humorous complaining and draws on the benign violation theory—which proposes that humor arises from things that seem simultaneously wrong yet okay—to examine how being humorous helps and hinders complainers. Six studies, which use social media and online reviews as stimuli, show that humorous complaints benefit people who want to warn, entertain, and make a favorable impression on others. Further, in contrast to the belief that humor is beneficial but consistent with the benign violation theory, humor makes complaints seem more positive (by making an expression of dissatisfaction seem okay), but makes praise seem more negative (by making an expression of satisfaction seem wrong in some way). Finally, a benign violation approach perspective also reveals that complaining humorously has costs. Because being humorous suggests that a dissatisfying situation is okay, humorous complaints are less likely to elicit redress or sympathy from others than nonhumorous complaints.

Benign Violations: Making Immoral Behavior Funny

Humor is an important, ubiquitous phenomenon; however, seemingly disparate conditions seem to facilitate humor. We integrate these conditions by suggesting that laughter and amusement result from violations that are simultaneously seen as benign. We investigate three conditions that make violations benign and thus amusing: 1) the presence of an alternative norm suggesting the situation is acceptable, 2) weak commitment to a violated norm, and 3) psychological distance from the violation. We test the benign violation hypothesis in the domain of moral psychology, which documents a strong association between moral violations and negative emotions, particularly disgust. Five experimental studies show that benign moral violations also tend to elicit laughter and amusement. Furthermore, seeing a violation as both wrong and not wrong mediates behavioral displays of amusement. Our account is consistent with evolutionary accounts of laughter, explains humor across many domains, and suggests humor can accompany negative emotion.

It's Funny Here. Is It There?

Last month’s column focused on theories of humor – the motivations behind humor – and the therapeutic use of humor and laughter as an adjuvant to medical treatment for patients with a variety of illnesses (Flaskerud, 2014). The theoretical motivations for humor described in the last column included several based on psychology – the expression of negative emotions, such as aggression and superiority; a coping mechanism for tension release; a means to resolve incongruity; a benign violation of various norms; and reverse engineering, an evolutionary development to correct errors in perception, based on neuroscience. The positive aspects of humor and the therapeutic use of laughter were explored also (Flaskerud, 2014). Several reports have demonstrated that laughter appears to improve mood, lessen anxiety, reduce psychological measures of stress, and reduce perception of pain (Christie & Moore, 2005). There are also physiological factors involved. Laughter can lead to changes in heart rate, skin temperature, blood pressure, pulmonary ventilation, skeletal muscle activity, and brain activity, which may improve overall wellbeing. Additionally, laughter may improve immune function by blocking the production of stress hormones, such as cortisol, and by increasing the release of immune-enhancers, such as beta-endorphin (Cancer Treatment Centers of America, 2013; Christie & Moore, 2005). Two other aspects of humor will be addressed here, as they apply to cultural differences and the use of humor. The first is: Are there other theoretical explanations of humor that do not rely on Western psychology and neuroscience? And second: Are humor and laughter used therapeutically in other cultures? It should be noted that humor and laughter are considered human traits: only humans have humor and we communicate it

The Rise and Fall of Humor

Humor is a ubiquitous experience that facilitates coping, social coordination, and well-being. We examine how humorous responses to a tragedy change over time by measuring reactions to jokes about Hurricane Sandy. Inconsistent with the belief that the passage of time monotonically increases humor, but consistent with the benign violation theory of humor, a longitudinal study reveals that humorous responses to Sandy’s destruction rose, peaked, and eventually fell over the course of 100 days. Time creates a comedic sweet spot that occurs when the psychological distance from a tragedy is large enough to buffer people from threat (creating a benign violation) but not so large that the event becomes a purely benign, nonthreatening situation. The finding can help psychologists understand how people cope and provide clues to what makes things funny and when they will be funny.

BAVC: Classifying Benign Atomicity Violations via Machine Learning

The reality of multi-core hardware has made concurrent programs pervasive. Unfortunately, writing correct concurrent programs is difficult. Atomicity violation, which is caused by concurrent executions unexpectedly violating the atomicity of a certain code region, is one of the most common concurrency errors. However, atomicity violation bugs are hard to find using traditional testing and debugging techniques. In this paper, we investigate an approach based on machine learning techniques (specifically decision tree and support vector machine (SVM)) for classifying the benign atomicity violations from the harmful ones. A benign atomicity violation is known not to affect the program's correctness even it happens. We formulate our problem as a supervised-learning problem and apply these two machine learning techniques to classify the atomicity violation report. Our experimental evaluation shows that the proposed method is effective in identifying the benign atomicity violation warnings.

The Rise and Fall of Humor: Psychological Distance Modulates Humorous Responses to Tragedy

Humor is a ubiquitous experience that facilitates coping, social coordination, and well-being. We examine how humorous responses to a tragedy change over time by measuring reactions to jokes about Hurricane Sandy. Inconsistent with the belief that the passage of time monotonically increases humor, but consistent with the benign violation theory of humor, a longitudinal study reveals that humorous responses to Sandy’s destruction rose, peaked, and eventually fell over the course of one hundred days. Time creates a comedic sweet spot that occurs when the psychological distance from a tragedy is large enough to buffer people from threat (creating a benign violation), but not so large that the event becomes a purely benign, non-threatening situation. The finding can help psychologists understand how people cope and provide clues to what makes things funny and when they will be funny.

Who Finds Benign Moral Violations Amusing?

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.