Risky Business: When Humor Increases and Decreases Status

T. B. Bitterly; A.W.  Brooks; M. E. Schweitzer

Article | Journal of Personality and Social Psychology | March 2017

Risky Business: When Humor Increases and Decreases Status

by T. B. Bitterly, A.W. Brooks and M. E. Schweitzer

Abstract

Across eight experiments, we demonstrate that humor can influence status, but attempting to use humor is risky. The successful use of humor can increase status in both new and existing relationships, but unsuccessful humor attempts (e.g., inappropriate jokes) can harm status. The relationship between the successful use of humor and status is mediated by perceptions of confidence and competence. The successful use of humor signals confidence and competence, which in turn increases the joke teller’s status. Interestingly, telling both appropriate and inappropriate jokes, regardless of the outcome, signals confidence. Although signaling confidence typically increases status, telling inappropriate jokes signals low competence and the combined effect of high confidence and low competence harms status. Rather than conceptualizing humor as a frivolous or ancillary behavior, we argue that humor plays a fundamental role in shaping interpersonal perceptions and hierarchies within groups.

Keywords: Status and Position; Behavior; Groups and Teams; Perception;

Format: Print

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Citation:

Bitterly, T. B., A.W. Brooks, and M. E. Schweitzer. "Risky Business: When Humor Increases and Decreases Status." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 112, no. 3 (March 2017): 431–455.

Much of an executive’s workday is spent asking others for information—requesting status updates from a team leader, for example, or questioning a counterpart in a tense negotiation. Yet unlike professionals such as litigators, journalists, and doctors, who are taught how to ask questions as an essential part of their training, few executives think of questioning as a skill that can be honed—or consider how their own answers to questions could make conversations more productive.
That’s a missed opportunity. Questioning is a powerful tool for unlocking value in companies: It spurs learning and the exchange of ideas, it fuels innovation and better performance, and it builds trust among team members. And it can mitigate business risk by uncovering unforeseen pitfalls and hazards.
Several techniques can enhance the power and efficacy of queries: Favor follow-up questions, know when to keep questions open ended, get the sequence right, use the right tone, and pay attention to group dynamics.

Does It Hurt To Ask? (DIHTA) is an interactive exercise that pairs students (in groups of two) for a brief, spontaneous, open-ended conversation during class. Each student is given instructions to ask many questions (as many as possible) or few questions (ideally zero) during their conversation (resulting in some high-high questioning pairs, some low-low questioning pairs, and some high-low questioning pairs). The exercise is flexible—it can stand on its own for a whole class session (taking 60-90 minutes), or it can be used to supplement other material within the same class session (taking as little as 30 minutes total). This teaching note provides step-by-step instructions to administer the exercise in class. The goals of the exercise are to examine how asking questions during conversation influences interpersonal perception, information exchange, decision making, productivity, as well as relationships and happiness over time—to weigh the pros and cons of asking questions versus making statements in conversation. While there are many reasons people don’t ask questions (such as egocentrism, anxiety, apathy, and ignorance), those who can become talented question askers stand to learn more information, to be better liked, and to have more influence than those who do not.

Working Paper | HBS Working Paper Series | 2018

Mitigating Malicious Envy: Why Successful Individuals Should Reveal Their Failures

Karen Huang, Alison Wood Brooks, Ryan W. Buell, Brian Hall and Laura Huang

People often feel malicious envy, a destructive interpersonal emotion, when they compare themselves to successful peers. Across two online experiments and an experimental field study, we identify an interpersonal strategy that can mitigate others’ feelings of malicious envy: revealing one’s failures. People are reticent to reveal their failures—both as they are happening and after they have occurred. However, in two experiments, we find that revealing successes and the failures encountered on the path to success (compared to revealing only successes) decreases observers’ malicious envy. This effect holds regardless of whether the individual is ambiguously or unambiguously successful. Then, in a field experiment set in an entrepreneurial pitch competition, where pride displays are common and stakes are high, we find suggestive evidence that learning about the failures of a successful entrepreneur decreases observers’ malicious envy, increases their benign envy, decreases their perceptions of the entrepreneur’s hubristic pride (i.e., arrogance), and increases their perceptions of the entrepreneur’s authentic pride (i.e., confidence). These findings align with previous work on the social-functional relation of envy and pride. Taken together, our results highlight how revealing the failures encountered on the way to success can be a counterintuitive yet effective interpersonal emotion regulation strategy.

Keywords: envy; malicious envy; Emotion Regulation; disclosure; Emotions; Perception; Interpersonal Communication; Communication Strategy;

Citation:

Huang, Karen, Alison Wood Brooks, Ryan W. Buell, Brian Hall, and Laura Huang. "Mitigating Malicious Envy: Why Successful Individuals Should Reveal Their Failures." Harvard Business School Working Paper, No. 18-080, February 2018. View Details

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Risky Business: When Humor Increases and Decreases Status

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