Joke-Telling Could Make You Appear More Confident and Competent
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A little humor in the workplace appears broadly beneficial: it can increase productivity and creativity and helps to build trust. But before you get too carried away attempting to stun your colleagues with your wit, you might want to heed the findings from new research in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, which focused on the effect of humour attempts on our personal status. The work shows that while a well-judged gag can cover us in glory, misses can have negative consequences. What’s more, this risky nature partly explains why we hold funny people in esteem.
Bitterly’s team suggest that “many individuals may be missing opportunities to project confidence, demonstrate their competence, and increase their status” by making attempts at tasteful humour. But how to avoid backfires? Humour usually involves some break with the expected or permitted, most often a social norm, but also absurdist humour that subverts reality itself, like Mitch Hedberg’s “My fake plants died, because I did not pretend to water them”. According to Bitterly’s group (and other humour scholars), the key to successful joke telling is to ensure your audience understands the threat is benign, rather than indicating genuine anti-social or confused thinking. When the joke leads people to wonder if you endorse the sentiment, or that you are providing cover for people that do, then they are liable to think less of you… even if you’ve perfected your comic – timing.
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