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After "attractive," few compliments are more universally welcomed than "funny." But being deemed hilarious or witty is more than just a personality trait that can win you more friends. If used successfully, humor also can boost your status at work, persuading others that you're both more confident and more competent than you may actually be, according to forthcoming research into the connection between status and humor.
"If you are brave enough to tell the joke that you want to tell, whether it succeeds or not, people ascribe confidence to you because they see you as efficacious" for taking such a risk with all the ways a joke can potentially fail, said Alison Wood Brooks, assistant professor at Harvard Business School and the paper's co-author. "To tell a successful joke does, in fact, take quite a lot of competence and not just general intelligence, but emotional intelligence, to figure out all those variables."
Humor is often viewed as superfluous or ancillary behavior and hasn't been thought of as something that affects relationships and hierarchy within organizations and in daily life.
In other words, don't be like Richmond.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by RedBear on Friday October 07 2016, @12:59PM
This just in: People are morons. They also tend to see you as more competent if you possess any of a long list of other attributes:
- Greater height (relative to any given local norm)
- Lighter skin tone (relative to any given local norm)
- Lower visible fatty tissue (within a certain range)
- Speech patterns, pronunciation, etc.
- Displayed confidence level
- Gender
- Hair color
- Choice of footwear
- General attractiveness
- and so on.
Now we can add "joke making" to the list. Fabulous.
Unfortunately none of these attributes actually have much of anything to do with whether or not someone is competent at any particular task. The fact that we still find all these attributes important and make assumptions about peoples' character and abilities based on such superficial observations just reveals how much the human animal still relies too much on instinct above intellect and reason.
¯\_ʕ◔.◔ʔ_/¯ LOL. I dunno. I'm just a bear.
... Peace out. Got bear stuff to do. 彡ʕ⌐■.■ʔ
(Score: 4, Insightful) by turgid on Friday October 07 2016, @01:12PM
It's ape behaviour. Nothing we can escape from completely.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 5, Funny) by Nerdfest on Friday October 07 2016, @01:27PM
Bah, you all sound like a bunch of short, fat people, with no sense of humour.
(Score: 3, Touché) by turgid on Friday October 07 2016, @01:28PM
You can tell all that just by reading this?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 07 2016, @02:45PM
Well, this is SN. Just sayin'.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 07 2016, @04:14PM
You just described the average USAian.
(Score: 2) by AnonymousCowardNoMore on Friday October 07 2016, @05:15PM
Now, there's no need to fling turds.
(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Friday October 07 2016, @01:17PM
Actually, one of the most important things on the list: facial and body symmetry. Those with symmetry are perceived as attractive leaders, those without are not.
What's interesting about all this is that in those rare instances where a person seen as asymmetric and thus unattractive manages to get into a leadership post, they are often better at it, largely because they had to compensate by getting spectacularly good at their job and leading others effectively in order to end up in charge of anything.
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 2) by DutchUncle on Friday October 07 2016, @04:38PM
"Symmetry" is also linked to perceptions of beauty, probably because it is also a visible signal of good health and good condition (both current and developmental).