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Preliminary Validation of a Multidimensional Model of Wittiness
Author(s) -
Feingold Alan,
Mazzella Ronald
Publication year - 1993
Publication title -
journal of personality
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 2.082
H-Index - 144
eISSN - 1467-6494
pISSN - 0022-3506
DOI - 10.1111/j.1467-6494.1993.tb00288.x
Subject(s) - psychology , humor research , cognition , sense of humor , social psychology , interpretation (philosophy) , dimension (graph theory) , developmental psychology , cognitive psychology , linguistics , neuroscience , philosophy , mathematics , pure mathematics
Past research on wittiness has found that ( a ) self‐ratings and peer ratings of wittiness are highly correlated, but neither type of rating is appreciably correlated with measured humor production, and ( b ) sociability is correlated with both types of wittiness ratings but not with humor production. An interpretation of these findings was provided by a multidimensional model of wittiness that conceptualizes wittiness as a factorially complex dimension shaped by three component traits: humor motivation, humor cognition, and humor communication. We conducted three correlational studies to test the hypotheses, derived from the theory, that ( a ) wittiness ratings are influenced by humor motivation and humor communication, whereas humor production taps only humor cognition, and ( b ) sociability is positively correlated with humor motivation and humor communication but unrelated to humor cognition. Results were consistent across studies and generally confirmed the predictions.