(This post appears on the Humor Code’s Huffington Post and Psychology Today blogs.) Massive open online courses, or MOOCs, are garnering lots of attention these days. Some see large-scale, web-based classes as the new frontier for colleges and universities, a great leap forward that could revolutionize higher education. Duke University professor of psychology and behavioral [...]
(This post was originally published on Huffington Post.) The studies run in the Humor Research Lab often require subjects to create something funny, like a write a joke or come up with an amusing caption. But when other folks are asked to rate what they’ve come up with, we run smack into an unfortunate truth: [...]
Over at Huffington Post, we recently detailed an experiment we ran involving some of New York’s top advertising creatives, a hypothetical marketing campaign, and lots and lots of booze. We wanted to investigate how alcohol impacts humor creation. To start, we showed our participants the Venn diagram Pete uses to illustrate his Benign Violation Theory, [...]
On the Huffington Post, we recently explored what science has to say about the late polemicist Christopher Hitchens’ claim that women aren’t as funny as men. As we noted, in nearly every sort of quantitative test imaginable, men and women have actually been found to be far more alike than different in how they perceive, [...]
