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The Humor Effect: How Laughing Helps You Remember
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The humor effect defined
The use of humor enhances people’s memory, whether they are trying to remember verbal information, such as words and sentences, or visual information, such as pictures and videos.
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Benefits of incorporating humor into learning
- Humorous information receives increased attention during the perception stage.
- Improved encoding. Our brain gives preferential treatment to humorous information when it comes to storing it in our memory.
- The use of humor serves as a distraction from negative emotions, such as anger or anxiety, that people might experience when processing certain information.
- Reading or viewing something humorous has a positive and energizing effect.
- Adding humor to the information that you are presenting can make it more interesting to others.
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Different types of humor lead to different outcomes
The use of positive, nonaggressive humor is associated with
- improved learning outcomes,
- a relaxed learning environment,
- better student evaluations,
- an increased motivation to learn,
- improved information recall,
- an increased degree of student satisfaction throughout the learning process.
The use of negative or aggressive humor, especially if aimed at particular students, will produce the opposite effect.
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Strategic humor tips
- Humor works better when it’s related to the information that you’re trying to remember. Try to use only relevant humor that pertains directly to the information that you want to emphasize.
- Humor serves as a better attention and memory aid when it’s unexpected in some way. Try to avoid information that could be perceived by your audience as too predictable.
- Humor works better when it’s not too subtle since some people simply won’t notice it.
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SIMILAR ARTICLES & IDEAS:
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The Verbatim Effect
The verbatim effect is a cognitive bias that makes people remember the general outline and meaning of the information that is provided and not the exact, complete details.
Examp...
Why We Experience the Verbatim Effect
There are two main memory processes:
- Gist Memory concentrates on the core meaning of the information.
- Verbatim Memory focuses on the surface form or the easily visible part of the information.
The Gist Memory is encoded in a better way because it is an important part of the information, and is not apparent at first, making it desirable and thus easier to retain.
Variance in the Verbatim Effect
The Verbatim Effect varies in its influence on people and may or may not occur in situations, as it depends on several factors like:
- The individual's preferences, abilities, and experience.
- The type of information, along with the reason for interacting with the information. A meaningless piece of information will not have any verbatim effect on an individual.
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Humor at work
Being funny can have both positive and negative consequences, in your personal as well as your professional life. And context is always important: when making a joke, for instance, you should defin...
Humor and its effects on the status
Humor and status have always been tightly linked: good leaders seem to often use humor in order to motivate their team members' actions. As individuals, we tend to prefer, researchers claim, jokes that make us laugh while feeling slightly uncomfortable.
Furthermore, we perceive the joke teller as a self-confident person, who could easily become a leader due to his or her courage to make such a joke. The key point here is that the joke should be appropriate and match the context.
Inside jokes
Making inside jokes usually shows how bounded a team or a group is: their jokes can understood the best by themselves.
However, the moment an outsider integrates the group, it is better to avoid the inside jokes, as this will most probably make him or her feel out of place.
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The cognitive dissonance theory
Suggests that holding 2 or more contradictory beliefs at the same time causes people to experience mental discomfort, which manifests as psychological stress.
And people will alw...
The Benjamin Franklin effect has generally been explained using cognitive dissonance theory.
Essentially, this means that when someone does you a favor, they need to be able to justify...
The Benjamin Franklin effect has generally been explained using cognitive dissonance theory.
Essentially, this means that when someone does you a favor, they need to be able to justify it to themself, in order to avoid the cognitive dissonance that might occur from doing something nice for someone that they dislike.
The Benjamin Franklin effect
Is a psychological phenomenon that causes us to like someone more after we do that person a favor: We justify our actions to ourselves, that we did them a favor because we liked them.
But the reverse effect is also true - we come to hate our victims, which helps to explain wartime atrocities.