Is laughter the best marketing? Why this is the wrong question.

Humor is often described as a miracle pill for marketers, yet the effects of humor on advertising, content marketing, service, and other marketing functions are wildly inconsistent. Before scholars can know whether a pun, prank, meme, or laugh will attract sales, clicks, or five-star reviews, they need to understand why the effects of humor appear to vary. Humor has different effects because scholars have treated humor as different constructs while studying how it influences different marketing outcomes with different types of stimuli in different of situations on different types of people.

A Randomized Trial of Behavioral Nudges Delivered Through Text Messages to Increase Influenza Vaccination Among Patients With an Upcoming Primary Care Visit.

Purpose: To evaluate if nudges delivered by text message prior to an upcoming primary care visit can increase influenza vaccination rates.

Design: Randomized, controlled trial.

Setting: Two health systems in the Northeastern US between September 2020 and March 2021.

A 680,000-person megastudy of nudges to encourage vaccination in pharmacies.

Encouraging vaccination is a pressing policy problem. To assess whether text-based reminders can encourage pharmacy vaccination and what kinds of messages work best, we conducted a megastudy. We randomly assigned 689,693 Walmart pharmacy patients to receive one of 22 different text reminders using a variety of different behavioral science principles to nudge flu vaccination or to a business-as-usual control condition that received no messages.

A megastudy of text-based nudges encouraging patients to get vaccinated at an upcoming doctor's appointment.

Many Americans fail to get life-saving vaccines each year, and the availability of a vaccine for COVID-19 makes the challenge of encouraging vaccination more urgent than ever. We present a large field experiment ( = 47,306) testing 19 nudges delivered to patients via text message and designed to boost adoption of the influenza vaccine. Our findings suggest that text messages sent prior to a primary care visit can boost vaccination rates by an average of 5%.

What Makes Things Funny? An Integrative Review of the Antecedents of Laughter and Amusement.

Despite the broad importance of humor, psychologists do not agree on the basic elements that cause people to experience laughter, amusement, and the perception that something is funny. There are more than 20 distinct psychological theories that propose appraisals that characterize humor appreciation. Most of these theories leverage a subset of five potential antecedents of humor appreciation: surprise, simultaneity, superiority, a violation appraisal, and conditions that facilitate a benign appraisal.

Differentiating what is humorous from what is not.

After 2.5 millennia of philosophical deliberation and psychological experimentation, most scholars have concluded that humor arises from incongruity. We highlight 2 limitations of incongruity theories of humor.

Too close for comfort, or too far to care? Finding humor in distant tragedies and close mishaps.

Humor is ubiquitous and often beneficial, but the conditions that elicit it have been debated for millennia. We examine two factors that jointly influence perceptions of humor: the degree to which a stimulus is a violation (tragedy vs. mishap) and one's perceived distance from the stimulus (far vs.

Values and preferences: defining preference construction.

Extensive research in the values and preferences literature suggests that preferences are sensitive to context and calculated at the time of choice. This has led to the view that preferences are constructed. Recent work calls for a better understanding of when preferences are constructed and when they are not.

Benign violations: making immoral behavior funny.

Humor is an important, ubiquitous phenomenon; however, seemingly disparate conditions seem to facilitate humor. We integrate these conditions by suggesting that laughter and amusement result from violations that are simultaneously seen as benign. We investigated three conditions that make a violation benign and thus humorous: (a) the presence of an alternative norm suggesting that the situation is acceptable, (b) weak commitment to the violated norm, and (c) psychological distance from the violation.