Encrypted humor and social networks in rural Brazil

The encryption theory of humor (Flamson & Barrett, 2008) proposes that one of the means by which people develop their social networks is assortment with the most compatible peers by signaling similarity in locally variable personal features through humor. Here we present experimental and observational evidence obtained on a collective farm in rural Brazil, where participants were presented with high- and low-encryption versions of jokes after assessing their prior knowledge, and completed a photo-sorting task to determine the structure of their social networks. These results, replicating previous findings using online surveys, demonstrated a significant effect of prior knowledge and some of the predicted interactions between prior knowledge and encryption level, as well as a small but significant effect of social closeness on similarity in joke ratings. Taken together, these findings support the hypotheses that (a) the cognitive processing of humor relies on an encryption–decryption process, (b) similarity in humor preferences reflects similarities in those cognitive processes and (c) that similarity plays a role in real-world social assortment.