Conservatism as a predictor of responses to humour-III. The prediction of appreciation of incongruity-resolution based humour by content saturated attitude scales in five samples

Abstract

Recently it was shown that appreciation of the incongruity-resolution structure in humour is mainly related to conservatism, the main factor in the attitude domain. The present study extends these findings and examines the predictive power of content based attitude scales. Five samples of altogether 663 subjects answered an inventory of attitudes and a humour test. The results generally confirm the model by showing correlations between markers of conservatism and judged funniness of incongruity-resolution humour. Attitude scales showing no correlation with conservatism also did not predict funniness of incongruity-resolution humour. Positive attitudes to sex and technical interests predicted funniness of sexual humour and aversiveness of all humour categories. Attention is given to a potential link between humour and psychosomatic disturbances.