Humor in Social Movements: A Novel Take on Environmentalism

Abstract

Humor is ubiquitous in human life and yet so little is understood of it. While studies on humor have largely centered on leadership and marketing, this paper seeks to understand the role of humor in advocacy for social movements. Literature on marketing suggests that using humor in communication efforts leads to several important benefits. For example, humorous information attracts more attention than non-humorous (Strick et. al, 2010). Humor also increases product liking by the mere association effect (Strick et al., 2009). Eisend (2011) argues that humor reduces negative cognitions related to the ad, because it serves as a distraction from counter-argumentation. Based on this body of research, the paper hypothesizes that humorous advocacy messages will lead to greater engagement with social movement causes than serious messages. This hypothesis is tested and validated in Study 1, using a subset of data from National Geographic’s Instagram account in a Amazon Mechanical Turk study design. As it currently stands, advocacy for environmental largely appeals to guilty and ethics instead of humor. Likewise, literature on environmentalism largely focuses on the ethics of humans harming the environment (Cox et al., 2013 & Janofsky, 2005 & Cantrill, 2015), or on people’s moral duty to save the nature (Rogers, 1998). But if humor has positive effects on product marketing and leadership, why haven’t social movement advocates been using it more often? Since advocacy efforts have historically appealed to guilt, ethics and self-sacrifice, advocates may think others would respond more to these appeals. This paper proposes that this “serious” deployment of advocacy efforts ultimately stems from people’s mistaken predictions that serious messages will lead to greater engagement with social causes. In Study 2, we used a subset of data from National Geographic’s #planetorplastic Instagram campaign in a Amazon Mechanical Turk experiment to show that people mistakenly predict others will donate more to serious messages. In that same study, we asked participants to design their own advocacy message for a Plastic Pollution non-profit in the form of a tweet, with a limit of 280 characters. The majority of messages designed by participants (over 80%) did not include humor. Aligned with participants’ intuitions, this paper does not believe humor is always appropriate in advocacy. Weinberg & Gulas (1992) argue that the relation of humor, attention and sales is complex, and that a greater understanding of humor can be enhanced with a greater understanding of the audience, situational context, and type of humor. Thus, while humor may not always be appropriate, it may thrive in certain contexts. Different types of humor are likely to work better depending on the advocate’s intended goal. In a closing section, we propose future directions for research on humor and social movements. In doing so, we add a needed nuance to the aforementioned studies and hopefully contribute to the scarce yet growing literature on this fascinating topic.