How Do Dark Personalities Use Humor?

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A new study, published in Personality and Individual Differences, explains how different people with dark personality traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy) gravitate towards different styles of humor. The paper suggests that their preferred style of humor helps them fulfill specific motives which may not always be noble or prosocial.

“Fyodor Dostoevsky used to say that ‘One can know a man from his laugh’,” explains psychologist Alberto Dionigi, the lead author of the paper. “This aphorism points out how humor can be fundamental to understanding the psychic structure of an individual.”

According to Dionigi, humor is a complex and multidimensional construct that combines several aspects, such as behavioral habits, abilities and competencies, personality traits, coping strategies, and character strengths.

Dionigi and his team based their study on a pair of questionnaires: one investigated participant demographics and personality and the other investigated eight categories of humor, classified in terms of:

• Light styles of humor, such as fun, humor, nonsense, and wit. These are positive styles of humor related to benign behaviors, cognitions, and goals.
• Dark styles of humor, such as irony, satire, sarcasm, and cynicism. These are generally negative styles of humor that are mostly based on mockery and ridicule and are correlated with poor mental well-being and tenuous relationships.

The study found that:

1. Machiavellianism was the best predictor of irony and was not related to the other comic styles.
2. Narcissism correlated significantly with lighter styles of humor, such as wit.
3. Psychopathy showed the strongest positive correlations with the mockery styles (satire, sarcasm, and cynicism).

Therefore, when it comes to dark personalities, the results of Dionigi’s study suggest that:

1. Machiavellians, being unscrupulous and intimidating, may use humor as a means of manipulating others.
2. Psychopaths may use malicious humor to lower others’ statuses and not consider others’ feelings, as they tend to exhibit deficits in emotional functioning.
3. Narcissistic people tend to use more positive humor, probably as a way to enhance their own reputations when interacting with others.

Humor can be a double-edged sword.

“If a person tells a joke and it is not understood by the recipient, the humor does not exist,” Dionigi explains. “Moreover, certain people with a specific diagnosis may not be aware of how their humor influences (negatively) their relationships. They can be sarcastic and cynical without understanding that this humor is detrimental.”

For this reason, he believes that shedding light on the different ways people express humor may be beneficial to better recognize what is positive (or not) for one’s purposes.

In fact, he mentions that during therapy, identifying what patients find funny can be useful for understanding the psychological functioning of the patient.

“I hope that this research may help to better understand how humor is a very complex phenomenon and distinct components of humor may exhibit quite different relationships with psychological well-being and satisfaction with life. Some are facilitative while others are detrimental,” he concludes.