Humor, personality and implications for learning situations
Leo Gürtler
University of Tuebingen, Germany
This is a work-in-progress paper on interindividual differences in humor and its
impact on education. Humor is rarely discussed as a distinct, autonomous personality
factor in education, specifically educational interactions. Additionally, there exists no
satisfying general scientific definition of humor in literature. Instead, humor is often
confounded with terms like laughter, wit or comic. Empirical studies operationalize humor
according to these terms and fail to catch that phenomenon on aspects of personality and
on identifying important effective situational determinants.
There are interesting correlations between humor and personality psychology. Most of them
were found between Five Factor Model (FFM) scales sensu Costa & McCrae (1985, Neo-PI)
and humor measures by Ruch (3WD, 1995d). The 3WD is divided into three scales:
incongruity-resolution (INC-RES), nonsense (NON) and sexual wits. Items are rated for
funniness (f) or aversiveness (a). In 1998 Ruch reports significant correlations between
INC-RESf/ agreeableness (r=.25), INC-RESf/ openness (r=-.22), NONf/ openness (r=.27) and
NONa/ openness (r=-.27). They are low, but consistent.
These results point towards humor as a reliable, important but relative independent aspect
of personality that contributes to the understanding of interindividual differences. To
establish these findings on a broader base, it is necessary to widen the area of research.
Also, it is recommended to describe the actual process of communication and interaction in
terms of humor as a contributing factor that might interact with personality and learning
styles.
An interesting and hopefully successful approach may be to establish a linkage between
humor, the FFM and certainty/ uncertainty orientation (CO/ UO, Huber & Roth 1999). CO
learners tend to avoid explicit searching for new, surprising and abnormal learning
techniques and are not attracted by seeking for incongruent information. Huber states,
they may constitute the majority of the learning population. On the other side UO learners
exactly do the opposite. They prefer unclear and not well structured situations. They
often try new ways of thinking, learning and are seeking for incongruent information. With
the CO/ UO concept, it is possible to describe not only learning behavior and style in
different teaching situations but to have a new personality style as a narrativ to do
research on interactions within these situations.
One step towards this goal is to find existent correlations of CO/ UO with FFM scales.
Results from Huber (unpublished) will be shown that give scores on two dimensions:
ambiguity and structure/ need for authority, that describe certainty/ uncertainty
orientation. Significant correlations were found between these scales and exraversion,
openness to experience, neuroticism and conscientousness. Now, it is necessary to identify
corresponding correlational matrices between humor preferences and actions. My ongoing
study at the moment is to find correlations between FFM, 3WD and CO/ UO. Results and
practical conclusions will be presented in the final paper.