EFFECTS OF AFFILIATIVE AND AGGRESSIVE HUMOR ON CREATIVE THINKING

Abstract

Previous correlational studies suggest that negative humor style such as
aggressive humor style is negatively and positive humor style such as affiliative
humor style is positively correlated with creativity. However, it is not yet to
experimentally demonstrate the effect of aggressive and affiliative humor on
creativity. Therefore, this experimental study was designed to investigate the
effect of affiliative humor (AF) and aggressive humor (AG) on creative thinking.
The researcher included 60 (38 male, 22 female) participants and randomly
assigned 20 in each of AF, AG, and control conditions. To induce humor,
theyused12 jokes in each condition. They used Remote Association Task (RAT)
for convergent thinking and Alternative Use of task (AUT) for divergent thinking
to measure individual creativity. The author expected that (i) people who engage
in affiliative humor would perform better at convergent thinking tasks than the
control group and the aggressive humor group, (ii) people who engage in
affiliative humor would perform better at divergent thinking tasks than the
control group and aggressive humor group. Results showed that the affiliative
humor successfully induced convergent thinking better than the control group
and aggressive humor in the RAT score. Similarly, AF humor successfully
induced better creativity than the control group and AG humor group in three
components of divergent thinking; fluency, flexibility, and elaboration. However,
the mean score of AF humor was better than the AG humor group but not
significant. In addition, aggressive humor, likewise affiliative humor, also
induced creative thinking in the RAT task and AUT. Thus, the results partially
supported all the hypotheses and indicated that in real life, humor induces
individual creative thinking whether the humor is positive or negative, it doesn't
matter. Both types of humor increase creative thinking.