The Psychology of Humor in Persuasion
Introduction
Majority of people ignore the use of humor in persuasion. When a person engages the audience with humor, he will achieve more than just a laugh from them. Humor makes the audience to open up to a person. The members of the audience are drawn more to a person who makes the laugh and this aids them to become more receptive. When person understands the use of humor in persuasion, it gives him leverage that it is tremendous. (Ckhumora, 2011).
Discussion
A person’s task is not only to see the profound influence of humor but also to skills development of ensuring that humor is used in an ethical and powerful way. When an element of humor is leveraged, any message coming from a person has more weight than a message coming from a person who hasn’t created the rapport for audience that one has already received. Humor reenergizes the souls of the audience and also reels them back. The audiences’ attention can be diverted by use of humor from thoughts that are negative or an argument that is playing in their mind can be countered. People like to be entertained while they listen. They are not going to be persuaded if they are not listening. (Tyagi, 440).
The audience however many they are will appreciate a moment of laughing or smiling. Humor is used every day in situations such as: humor in presentation will ease pain that is emotional, creates an environment that is positive and also increase participation. Humor will help in delivery of the massage in that it reveals truths that are important, the message will become more memorable, make topics that are difficult to be more memorable, and bring entertainment that is needed. Humor will also ease the audience tension, ensure they are in a good mood, disarm them, their attention will be maintained and their receptivity will be enhanced. For a living, everyone persuades. Whether one is an entrepreneur, a professional in sales or a parent who stays at home, if he is not able to convince other people to his thinking way, then he will always be left behind. Persuasion will lead to an increase in someone’s income, help in improvement of one relationship, help one to get what he wants and win life friends. ( Beard, 2005).
In the training of business, humor in persuasion is used. For example, cartoon drawings will lead to persuasion by the source liking, wisecracks that are ironic will enhance persuasion by distracting the counterarguments and humor that is self effacing enhances persuasion by improving the credibility of the source. An example of use of humor in persuasion in training of business ethics is whereby business students in Canada participated in one of four versions of the ethics challenge. By adding or re moving cartoon drawings and responses of humor, three versions were modified. Removal of the drawings of cartoon had an effect on persuasion that was little, removal of wisecracks that were ironic had an effect that was more, and interference with humor that was self effacing with combination with wisecracks and cartoons had the effect that was the strongest.( Sloan, 2010).
Factors influencing humor in persuasion
There are many factors that determine whether a humor is effective or not in persuading a person and these include; the situation or the mood will determine whether the humor is effective or not e.g. a person cant start cracking jokes to a person who has just learned that one of his family members is death. For a person to discern mood or a particular setting, he has to be observative because what was funny yesterday to a person will not be funny today to the same person. The other factor that affects humor is the time of the day, the number of individuals in the audience or the lighting or the layout of the room. Mornings are stressful since it is the time demands that await people confront them. People are more receptive to a good joke when at lunch break or when they are getting ready to leave work. (Martin, 466).
As far as the audience is concerned, the rule of thumb applies, the bigger the audience, the more smiles a person will get. Why is this case? The reason is because laughter is contagious. People laugh more when many are involved. E.g. when a movie hall is full, the laughter is always greater and lasts for a longer time unlike when there are three people in the audience. This is the reason why producers of TV use in their programming the canned laughter because the use of laugh tracks makes people to laugh more. Whether the item is funny or not funny, people laugh more if their hear the others laughing. If a person knows this tendency, it can be of great help when considering the room layout that he will be speaking in. The effectiveness will ride the tides of emotions of the members of the public. The role of humor that is complex in persuasion depends on the audience characteristics e.g. distraction, attention, self-esteem, intelligence and involvement. (Dillard, 499).
There is a wide spread of use of humor in radio and TV and this suggests that advertisers see humor as a tool that is useful in persuading people to purchase their products and services. Also humor is used by politicians in their campaigns to persuade people to give them votes. In research carried out, it has been found out that making a message humorous is not a must that it will be persuasive. Some findings of research suggests that the humor role in persuasion is very complicated with some types of humor in some situations contributing to persuasiveness and not in others e.g. a study found out that advertisements that were humorous were more effective on those people who had an attitude that was positive towards the product than those advertisements that were nonhumorous. It was found out by another study that humor in low intensity products increased the persuasion level while humor addition to the approach of hard sell led to a decrease in persuasiveness. (Ckuhumora, 2011).
Humor effectiveness in advertisements depends on ones objective, the audience that is targeted, the advertised product and the humor type. Persuasion can be obtained through two routes that are potential: the peripheral route and central route. The central route is about message elaboration that is active by the listeners and this occurs when it is found by the listener that the message is relevant personally. Here, the listeners will be convinced by the argument if they see it as compelling in a logical way. In the case of peripheral route, the response is affected by emotions, moods, etc. This type of route occurs when the listener is not invested and motivated highly and is not able to comprehend the message. (Martin, 2007).
References
American Psychological Association. Psychological abstracts: University of Michigan, 2002.
Beard, F.K. Humor in the advertising business: theory practice.USA: Rowman & Littlefield publishers, 2008.
Ckhumora. “Relieve stress using humor”. Increasing persuasion with humor, 19 April 2011.
Clay J. & Robinson D. Social structure and emotion: Academic press, 2008
Dillard J. P.The persuasionhandbook: Sage publications, 2002
Hoyer W. & Macinnins D. Consumer behavior: Cengage learning, 2009.
Martin, R.A.The psychology of humor. London: Elsevier Inc, 2007.
Sloan. Factors that influence humor in persuasion, 23 may 2010.
Swisher A. & Lauwers J. Counseling the nursing mother: Jones & Barlet, 2010.
Tyagi C. & Kumar A. Advertising management: Atlantic publishers and distributors, 2004.
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