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The Love for the Null Hypothesis: Psychology and Humor Studies
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20265 |
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Section : |
CULTURE
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1992 |
769 Words |
| Author
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Victor Raskin
Victor Raskin is professor of linguistics at Purdue
University. He is editor in chief of the quarterly magazine
Humor: International Journal of Humor Research. As a
contributing editor to the Culture section, he has prepared
the special series The Mission of Humor, which continues
publication in this issue of THE WORLD & I. The series, which
began in the April 1992 issue, will conclude in the August
1992 issue. |
This is the fourth installment of our series The Mission of Humor. It is truly amazing that we have not previously heard from the psychologists of humor. Since Sigmund Freud published Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious in 1905 (revealing among many other things what a rotten sense of humor he had), most humor research (at least up to a decade or so ago) has been conducted by psychologists.
And it is probably fair to say that most psychologists belong to the incongruity-based-humor school of thought (the link of two disparates, as we discussed in April), talking smartly about arousal and resolution in jokes and trying to get confirmation of their views from their human subjects. The experiments aimed both ways, attempting to gain insights into humor and to learn about human behavior from the subjects' reactions to humor.
Psychologists like Eysenck exposed subjects of various nationalities to humor from foreign cultures and probably derived truly perverse pleasure observing a French person tortured by a German defecation joke or a German sorting out the hedonistic frivolities in a French cartoon. Others wanted to know about yet another difference between men and women, namely, how they related to the same kind of humor. Yet others were interested in the acquisition of humor by children, claiming, for instance, that puns were not accessible to very young children.
The experimental basis and love of statistics set the psychological involvement in humor research apart from that of many other disciplines. What continues to amaze and baffle theoreticians from other areas, however, is some psychologists' devotion to the null hypothesis. Going into the initial experiment with more or less arbitrary stimuli, they hope to identify significant clusters of behaviors that will enable some conceptual constructs to be grouped together. Those groupings are then further tested in subsequent experiments, and the results make sense. It just cannot be, can it? This is very much like what a London Zoo patron once said, looking at a resident giraffe. "There cannot be such a long neck," he said, but he was looking at it!
After having paid his dues to the search for gender differences in humor perception and reserved his judgment on the much debated question of whether women liked dirty jokes less than men did, Peter Derks has lent his own brain to science. I mean, literally. Its activity was scanned and recorded in the process of its owner's understanding and resolving a joke: starting cognition in a normal fashion, being defeated by an
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