The Effectiveness of Humor in Persuasion: The Case of Business Ethics Training
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this study, persuasion theory was used to develop the following predictions about use of humor in persuasive messages for business ethics training: (a) cartoon drawings will enhance persuasion by creating liking for the source, (b) ironic wisecracks will enhance persuasion by serving as a distraction from counterarguments, and (c) self-effacing humor will enhance persuasion by improving source credibility. Canadian business students (N = 148) participated in 1 of 4 versions of "The Ethics Challenge," a training exercise used by the Lockheed Martin Corporation. Three versions were modified by adding or removing cartoon drawings (of cartoon characters Dilbert and Dogbert) and humorous responses (Dogbert's wisecracks). Removing the cartoon drawings had little effect on persuasiveness. Removing ironic wisecracks had more effect, and interfering with the self-effacing combination of cartoons and wisecracks had the strongest effect. The results suggest that researchers should ground their predictions in existing theory and that practitioners should differentiate among humor types.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it