Punchline with(out) purpose: Integrating research on instructional humour and seductive details

We integrated research on instructional humour and seductive details to investigate when affiliative course-related humour is effective or rather ineffective for learning. We assumed that instructional humour without a cognitive function (irrelevant humour) would have detrimental effects on learning performance resembling the seductive details effect, whereas humour with a cognitive function (e.g., humorous analogies illustrating the learning content) would foster performance.

Our hypotheses were tested in two between-subjects studies. Study 1 was conducted in the laboratory with 115 adults (M_age = 24.71); Study 2 was conducted in a German high school with 151 youths (M_age = 12.21). In both studies, participants learned from a narrated slideshow in one of four conditions: the slideshow either contained irrelevant humour, relevant humour, relevant (non-humorous) examples or no additional elements (control). We then assessed learning performance, cognitive load and affective-motivational aspects.

In study 1, the relevant-humour group indeed outperformed the irrelevant-humour group in terms of transfer. We replicated this effect in study 2 for recall performance. Our comparison to the control group without additional elements was less conclusive: The irrelevant-humour group scored worse than the control group in study 1 (i.e., seductive details effect), but not in study 2. Moreover, the relevant-humour group did not clearly outperform the control group in either of the studies.

It may be safer to avoid irrelevant instructional humour (even when course-related) because of the risk of a detrimental seductive details effect. Further research is needed with respect to the cognitive and affective-motivational effectiveness of relevant instructional humour.