Contingent Effects of Humor Type and Cognitive Style on Consumer Attitudes

In the spirit of examining humor contextually, we consider a basic question in this essay: do different humor types “play by the same rules,” cognitively speaking? We examine the relationship between humor and cognitive processing style, as operationalized through Need for Cognition. We find that humor based on disparagement processes “breaks through” the cognitive differences inherent in incongruity humor. Rather than exhibiting incongruity-based humor’s affective response transferring to attitude for low-NFC subjects, and more centrally-employing high NFC subjects’ higher tendency to dismiss the humor’s effect on overall attitude, disparagement based humor is processed the same by both low- and high-NFC respondents. Overall, our findings suggest that the relationship between cognitive processing (as operationalized through Need for Cognition) and resultant attitudes is a complicated one, strongly contingent on humor type. Were only incongruity-based humor utilized, our findings would have reinforced Zhang’s (Psychol Mark 13:531–545, 1996b) assertion that a person’s Need for Cognition will play a key role in the evaluation of humor, but our results suggest that a more complex conceptualization of the relationship between humor and attitude formation is required when humor is treated as a potentially more complicated, context-dependent construct.