During her first year at UNC Greensboro, Meriel Burnett recruited more than 800 of her fellow students to tell jokes.
She set up different premises – for example, reacting to someone’s bad cooking. The students had to craft a joke about the experience. She got more than 2,000 jokes.
They ranged from clean…
“It was so bad they gave it a reality show.”
…To crass…
“It made Lady Gaga’s meat suit look [expletive] scrumptious.”
The point of Burnett’s research, supported by Dr. Paul Silvia, professor of social psychology, was to make sense of who uses profanity in creative ways.
“You can learn a lot about a person by the sorts of thing they find funny,” says Burnett.
Her study of swearing in humor caught the attention of scientists in the American Psychological Association (APA)’s Division 10, its charter division dedicated to cognition, creativity, motivation, personality, and the relationship between pathology and the arts. Her presentation earned first place in the student showcase of the division’s 2024 conference.
Profanity’s Place in Creative Thinking
Having already earned a bachelor’s in psychology, Burnett came from Canberra, Australia to UNCG to get her master’s. She chose to focus on the psychology of creativity. “Psychology of intelligence is generally tested by the things you know. Psychology of creativity is broader than that,” she explains.
Creativity comes into play when we tell a joke, formulate a theory, or when we embellish our retelling of an event. It’s critical for problem-solving and abstract thinking.
Silvia was an appropriate mentor for Burnett. He has spent years working on ways to measure creativity and artistic expression, publishing five books through the American Psychological Association about speaking, writing, and day-to-day life assessment. Other UNCG students have worked with him to research perseverance and daydreaming.
Burnett centered her work on the psychology of language and how people’s choice of words may relate to individual differences like personality. “We use something called a joke stems task,” she says. “We gave people three setups for a joke, and they created the ending.”
Burnett says text data is exciting to work with because of the variety of parameters she can apply to it. “There’s obviously how funny a joke is. But there are so many other linguistic qualities: What kind of joke do they make? Is it abstract? Is it concrete? Is it really long? Really short? Did they use sarcasm or a double entendre?”
What Language Tells Us About People
Researching profanity may sound tongue in cheek, but it has practical applications for understanding social interactions. Swearing can be used in jest – Burnett told her participants to imagine telling their joke to their friends – but it can also hurt or degrade someone. It’s used to measure the appropriateness of a response – cursing about bad food will be taken differently from cursing during a life-or-death scenario.
Furthermore, some people may laugh at a crude joke but never make one themselves. Out of the responses from UNCG participants, only seven percent used swearing.
The participants also had to rate how funny they thought their own joke was and fill out personality surveys. Burnett computed personality scores based on the five categories of the NEO Five-Factor Personality Inventory: neuroticism, extraversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. She and Silvia then entered all that data into a machine learning model along with the subjects’ ages and gender.
Burnett’s findings suggested that the category of “agreeableness” may predict a person’s use of profanity in a joke. “Someone with high agreeableness generally wants smooth social relationships, while low agreeableness is more of a troublemaker,” she explains.
The disparity was most notable in men. She says, “Men high in agreeableness never used profanity. Women might use a little bit of it, but men with low agreeableness who thought they were funny ended up being the big swearers.”
Cultural Differences
As an Australian studying in the United States, Burnett understood countries and cultures have different norms for swearing – including its overall acceptability and the degree of offensiveness tied to each word. To make sure she did not miss any profane words, she utilized an online database typically used by websites to filter out swearing in comments.
There is an enormous collection of words considered to be profane in some way, and they range from quite mild to extremely severe,” says Burnett. “We were able to sidestep the issue of cultural differences by taking this massive profanity dictionary and then manually correcting if it flagged a word in error.”
Award-Winning Findings
As Burnett’s award demonstrates, professionals take profanity seriously.
Silvia felt that Burnett’s work was relevant to the APA’s Division 10, one of 19 charter divisions that includes research about creativity and personality. He encouraged Burnett to share her research at the APA Division 10: Society for Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts Conference, held in March just outside Dallas, Texas.
The student showcase was open to any student in higher education. Each presenter had to give a three-minute talk with one PowerPoint slide. “It was a very friendly conference. Everyone was so nice,” says Burnett. “But the other speeches were so excellent that I didn’t think I had much of a chance of winning.”
She was pleasantly surprised to take first place, especially after swearing like a sailor in front of the judges.
“I was firing off swear words like nobody’s business,” she laughs. “I censored them on my slide so it would not be too shocking to look at them. I do try to be polite and adjust to the culture, but I was saying an F-word here and there. It’s all for science.”
Story by Janet Imrick, University Communications
Photography courtesy of Meriel Burnett, College of Arts and Sciences, and Adobe Stock
