Comic Perception and Incongruent Causal Events: the Role of Paradoxical Animacy

As noticed by Michotte (1946), triggering effect, in which there is incongruity between cause and effect, produces a funny impression. To explore this phenomenon and more generally the perceptual bases of humor, we focused on the role of paradoxical animacy, that is, the simultaneous presence of mechanical and psychological features, in causal paradigm. We hypothesized that animations that produce animacy impressions are associated with higher comic ratings than animations producing only mechanical incongruity. In the present experiment the second part of the causal event varied in speed, size, shape, color, or trajectory, generating 13 animations incongruent with launching. We measured the impression of both animacy and comic on a 1-10 scale in 28 naïve observers. Data analysis showed a significant correlation between animacy and comic ratings. General findings strongly suggest that paradoxical animacy is a relevant factor in perception of humor. Humor has traditionally been seen as a multidimensional phenomenon, accounted for emotional, motivational, and cognitive factors. In cognitive psychology comic has been studied in problem-solving activities, as well in linguistic and graphical tasks. A crucial determinant of comic, since Aristotele, seems to be incongruity. It has been defined also in term of ‘bisociation’ to refer to the juxtaposition of two normally incongruous frames of reference (Koestler, 1964). While the most theories and experiments analyzed high level properties of humorous stimuli or the way they are processed (see for a review Martin, 2007), very few is known about the role of perceptual factors in funny events. To explore this area we started from an observation made by Michotte, during his seminal work on causal perception. He found that if the launched object is much faster than the launcher, it seems ‘triggered’ by the first, and looked funny (Michotte, 1946). He explained this effect in terms of incongruity between the first and the second part of the event. Lately some authors have pointed out that some causal events are spontaneously perceived as social or psychological events. For instance, if the second moving object begins to move before the contact, it appears ‘escaping’ from the first, effect named ‘intentional reaction’ (Kanizsa & Vicario, 1978) and ‘psychological causality’ (Schlottmann, Allen, Linderoth, & Hesketh, 2002). We hypothesized that incongruity between cause and effect, in launching paradigm, is a necessary but not sufficient condition to perceive an event as comic. We tested the hypothesis that incongruous events become comic when they elicit an impression of paradoxical animacy, that is, the impression that moving squares behave as animate agents.