Hello everyone, I am Wen Duan from Cornell university. I’m going to present some preliminary findings on intercultural humor.
Humor is a great social skill.
Making people laugh and laughing at other people’s joke makes a person amiable.
In teams, when members feel free to joke with one another,
it often suggests team cohesiveness and solidarity.
In multilingual multicultural teams, however,
humor might not be easily shared by members of different cultural and language background.
As we know, a majority of humor hinges on certain cultural references
that are encoded for the audience to decode in order to achieve humorous effect.
For nonnative speakers who do not have adequate cultural and linguistic knowledge,
decoding native humor can be challenging.
Our study sought to identify the common sources of confusion and challenges
regarding intercultural humor encountered by nonnative speakers in multilingual teams,
and propose potential solutions to address these challenges.
We took a grounded theory approach in both data collection and analysis.
We interviewed 28 people from East Asian countries, who were at the time studying or working at Cornell.
They were asked about their experience with humor in different settings including various types of meetings.
We stopped collecting data until our themes were saturated.
We categorized
the sources of confusion into language-related, culture-related, and that related to both language and culture.
Please refer to our paper for some sample quotes for each category.
What’s the most interesting in our findings is this potential misalignment of common ground assumption between native and nonnative speakers.
The nonnative speakers we interviewed
believed that native speakers in the US assume them to know the reference required to get their humor.
as this quote illustrates
the potential misalignment comes in when nonnative speakers assume that all nonnative speakers would know the reference required to get the humor, even though this might not be true.
But this assumption had emotional and interpersonal consequences.
Nonnative speakers didn’t want to feel dumb or not sociable or not funny.
They want to be just as intellectually and socially competent as native speakers.
So they try to match up to what they think every native speaker knows
and try to be an equal participant in humor. As this person admitted
Nonnative speakers would feel more stressful and more embarrassed if they believe the reference required to get the humor is common knowledge
and knowledge that’s been around for a long time versus knowledge that is more niche and emerging.
For example, as this person said
So the problem is,
they are not able to tell if certain knowledge is common versus niche,
or long-standing versus emerging.
To better support their humor experience,
we developed this diagram mapping out different types of knowledge that affect nonnative speakers perceived importance of knowing.
These types of knowledge lie along two correlated dimensions
based on nonnative speakers' assumptions about how common the knowledge is among native speakers
and the diffusion of the knowledge with time.
The larger the area is, the more nonnative speakers would assume the knowledge to be well-known
and well-established,
the greater the perceived importance of knowing,
and in turn, the more negative the consequence of not knowing it.
How technology can help?
We propose that developing a cultural reference index through crowdsourcing
may address this misalignment between native and nonnative speakers for more fluid humor interaction.
For instance, search engines or system can generate an index of all the cultural references
based on frequency of look-ups by nonnative speakers
This index can be integrated into a conversation agent
to flag potential lack of understanding in real time to the native speakers,
or a personal agent for nonnative speakers that discreetly provides information about cultural references.
That's all about my presentation. Thank you very much for listening.