Socio-cultural and individual factors in verbal irony use and understanding: What we know, what we don’t know, what we want to know

Abstract

AA significant part of everyday verbal communication consists of nonliteral language, including irony (Gibbs 2000). Efficient irony use can serve a wide range of pragmatic goals, while deficits in irony comprehension can have negative social consequences. Whereas a large body of psycholinguistic research has been produced on irony use and understanding by adults, little attention has been paid to the socio-cultural characteristics of this phenomenon so far. Some individual factors that have been identified as correlates of irony use include personality of the speaker, gender, age, or speaking a second language. In this article, we argue that it is necessary to bring the aspects of socio-cultural variables and individual characteristics together in the further study of irony across national cultures. To this end, we present a narrative review of theoretical and quantitative empirical literature from the field of psycholinguistics on both national cultural and individual/psychological factors impacting the use and understanding of verbal irony in communication. Based on the review, we suggest a theoretical model that could guide future quantitative studies on irony use such that both contextual factors (including national cultural dimensions) and individual differences between the speakers are clearly defined and related to one another in terms of their influence.

Cross-cultural nuances in sarcasm comprehension: a comparative study of Chinese and American perspectives

“…Moreover, the meaning of sarcastic statements could vary due to the impacts of individual differences of senders [e.g., age ( Brewer et al, 1981 ); gender ( Hoffman and Hurst, 1990 ); occupation ( Pratto and Bargh, 1991 ; Cui et al, 2023 )] and receivers [e.g., age, ( Howman and Filik, 2020 ; Garcia et al, 2022 ); theory of mind ( Blasko and Kazmerski, 2006 ; Tiv et al, 2023 ); working memory capacity ( Olkoniemi et al, 2016 , 2019 ); personal trait ( Mewhort-Buist and Nilsen, 2013 )] as well as the sociocultural context ( Blasko et al, 2021 ; Zhu and Filik, 2023 ). However, relatively few studies explored sarcasm comprehension cross-culturally to data ( Banasik-Jemielniak and Kałowski, 2022 ; Zhu and Filik, 2023 ), To fill the gap, the current study aims to explore how national culture impact sarcasm comprehension in both Chinese and American groups.…”

“…The comprehension and use of sarcasm could vary across different cultures ( Banasik-Jemielniak and Kałowski, 2022 ). For example, individuals from collectivist societies are generally more inclined to use and seek out implied meanings compared to those from individualistic cultures ( Holtgraves, 1997 ).…”

“…However, for the Chinese participants, sarcasm was seen as more amusing but also more aggressive than literal criticism. Despite the examination of some cross-cultural studies, the influence of cultural variables has been predominantly disregarded ( Zhu and Filik's, 2023 ), notwithstanding considerable theoretical indications of its importance, which underscores the necessity to integrate a cross-cultural perspective in the field of psycholinguistic sarcasm research ( Banasik-Jemielniak and Kałowski, 2022 ).…”

Sarcasm use in Turkish: The roles of personality, age, gender, and self-esteem

“…For instance, the author of the self-presentation style scale we used found that self-promotion is positively correlated to rivalry, narcissism, competence, self-ascription, cultural masculinity, and need of achievement, whereas self-deprecation showed positive correlations with self-ascription of moral traits and a chronic tendency to complain, and negative correlations with self-esteem, narcissism, and cultural masculinity [ 45 ]. This may have interesting implications for establishing the personality correlates and predictors of sarcasm use, which is a valuable and novel research direction (see [ 15 , 69 ]). For example, it may be worthwhile to consider the role of such variables as trait anger, trait narcissism, or neuroticism in greater detail.…”

“…complain, and negative correlations with self-esteem, narcissism, and cultural masculinity [45]. This may have interesting implications for establishing the personality correlates and predictors of sarcasm use, which is a valuable and novel research direction (see [15,69]). For example, it may be worthwhile to consider the role of such variables as trait anger, trait narcissism, or neuroticism in greater detail.…”