¶ Benign violations: Making immoral behavior funny

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¶ BibTeX

@article{mcgraw2010benign,
  title={Benign violations: Making immoral behavior funny},
  author={McGraw, A Peter and Warren, Caleb},
  journal={Psychological science},
  volume={21},
  number={8},
  pages={1141--1149},
  year={2010},
  publisher={Sage Publications Sage CA: Los Angeles, CA}
}

¶ Abstract

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 investigated three conditions that make a violation benign and thus humorous: (a) the presence of an alternative norm suggesting that the situation is acceptable, (b) weak commitment to the violated norm, and (c) psychological distance from the violation. We tested the benign-violation hypothesis in the domain of moral psychology, where there is a strong documented association between moral violations and negative emotions, particularly disgust. Five experimental studies show that benign moral violations tend to elicit laughter and amusement in addition to disgust. Furthermore, seeing a violation as both wrong and not wrong mediates behavioral displays of humor. Our account is consistent with evolutionary accounts of laughter, explains humor across many domains, and suggests that humor can accompany negative emotion.

¶ My Notes

From an evolutionary perspective, humorous violations likely originated as apparent physical threats, similar to those present in play fighting and tickling (Gervais & Wilson, 2005). As humans evolved, the situations that elicited humor likely expanded from apparent physical threats to a wider range of violations, including violations of personal dignity (e.g., slapstick, physical deformities), linguistic norms (e.g., unusual accents, malapropisms), social norms (e.g., eating from a sterile bedpan, strange behaviors), and even moral norms (e.g., bestiality, disrespectful behaviors). The benign-violation hypothesis suggests that anything that is threatening to one’s sense of how the world “ought to be” will be humorous, as long as the threatening situation also seems benign