Predicting Intentions to Engage With Scientific Messages on Twitter: The Roles of Mirth and Need for Humor

Abstract

Although humor is a recommended strategy for scientists to connect with publics, there is a lack of empirical evidence concerning its effectiveness. We conduct an experiment to test how funny science on Twitter affects engagement intentions. We find that different humor types caused viewers to experience different levels of mirth, which mediated the relationship between our experimental manipulation and engagement intentions. We also find need for humor, an individual trait, to moderate the relationship between mirth and engagement intentions. These findings extend our understanding of humor in science communication and offer empirical evidence on which practical advice can be grounded.

Following science on social media: The effects of humor and source likability

“…There is also evidence that the humorousness of a scientific message predicts people’s intentions to engage with such content (Yeo et al, 2020). Given the existing evidence, we hypothesize the following:…”

Emotion and humor as misinformation antidotes

“…Not only is a scientist performing a standup comedy routine perceived as more likable and credible, but greater perceptions of expertise are subsequently associated with perceptions of comedy as valid sources of science information (109). Experiencing humor as a result of funny science content also increases people's motivations to follow more science on social media and their intentions to share and engage with such content (84,108). Notably, these recent works on science humor are, for the most part, conducted with jokes that tend to be benign and inoffensive.…”

Generating Science Buzz: An Examination of Multidimensional Engagement With Humorous Scientific Messages on Twitter and Instagram

“…Humor has been endorsed as an avenue for scientific outreach by communication scholars (e.g., Goodwin & Dahlstrom, 2014;Yeo et al, 2020) and scientific organizations (e.g., Science Riot, 2018). While the positive impact of humor on engagement with science has been demonstrated empirically, most relevant studies have either relied on a unitary or generalized conception of it (e.g., Cacciatore et al, 2020), or focused exclusively on satire and/ or sarcasm (e.g., Anderson & Becker, 2018;Skurka et al, 2019).…”

“…Indeed, it has long been recognized that different communicative goals may be achieved through the use of varied types of humor (Speck, 1987;Weinberger & Gulas, 1992). Nevertheless, studies that have sought to demonstrate the attitudinal effects of exposure to varied types of humor have mostly focused on political humor (e.g., Becker, 2012;Holbert et al, 2011;Polk et al, 2009) or humor in advertising (e.g., Hoffmann et al, 2014;Ivanov et al, 2019), with few emerging from science communication (Yeo et al, 2020(Yeo et al, , 2021. Therefore, a finer-grained look at humor's use in science communication on social media, including the association between specific humor types and user engagement, is overdue.…”