The everyday conception of humor: The relationship with children's theory of mind

Common, everyday experience suggests that young children have a peculiar sense of humor that greatly differs from adults'. Children often tell nonsensical jokes and tell the same joke to the same person repeatedly. Does children's behavior reflect a general deficit in cognition or a qualitatively different understanding of humor? To answer this question, the adult conception of what makes something ftmny was compared with children's in terms of reasoning and behavior, and related to the more general understanding of mental states and social interaction. This project represents a new direction in describing and explaining children's humor.;Three experiments examined the everyday conception of humor, the development of this conception, and how humor understanding is related to joke-telling behavior. Psychological literature suggests that incongruity and comprehension are necessary for a joke to be funny. To investigate whether these factors are part of the conception of humor, four- to eight-year-olds and adults were given stories about characters who did not possess the necessary mental state and asked to predict whether the character would laugh or find a joke funny. Participants were also given a situation to investigate joke-telling behavior in which one character possessed a necessary mental state and the other did not. The participants were asked to whom they would tell a joke based on the mental state. Finally, a sample of jokes for each participant was taken.;As hypothesized, the results suggest that adults view both incongruity and comprehension to be necessary for humor, while not considering other unrelated variables. Five-year-olds developed an appreciation of the necessity of incongruity and eight-year-olds considered comprehension important. This understanding was further demonstrated in children's joke-telling behavior and how much sense their jokes made. Children who thought that incongruity and comprehension were not important chose to tell jokes to people who would not find the joke funny and told nonsensical jokes. One unpredicted result was that children's understanding of humor was not related to their understanding of the mind, implying development through experience with humor. These results suggest that children's joking behavior is based on their understanding of humor, not only general conceptual development.