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Beyond a joke

https://www.campaignlive.co.uk/article/beyond-joke/1338695

If humour is a way of making it enjoyable to change our minds, it matters immensely. It matters because advertising is becoming progressively less and less funny. It also matters if we are to solve the most important behaviour change challenges of our time: say what you like about environmentalists, they aren’t exactly a barrel of laughs”

In Inside Jokes – Using Humour To Reverse-Engineer The Mind, the three authors, among them Daniel Dennett, propose that humour “evolved out of a computational problem that arose when our long-ago ancestors were furnished with open-ended thinking. Mother Nature – aka natural selection – cannot just order the brain to find and fix […] mis-leaps and near-misses. She has to bribe the brain with pleasure. So we find them funny.”

According to one theory, humour evolved as a kind of social behaviour change mechanism. A means for people to point out mistakes without getting punched in the face. (In King Lear, the fool is generally the only person who is talking any sense.)

Red Bull can tell you a lot about how people really choose a drink. In the same way Ray Kroc showed an extraordinary insight into the evolutionary psychology behind McDonald’s: “People don’t want the best burger in the world; they want a burger that’s just like the one they had last time.” We have evolved to like eating food we have survived eating before.

Over the past few years, I have become convinced that advertising or marketing is potentially a kind of Galápagos Islands for understanding evolutionary psychology. Just as the beaks of finches can reveal a great deal about physical evolution, so the patterns of human consumerism can help us reverse engineer a better understanding of what people really want, as distinct from what they say they want. Amos Tversky, the late research partner of Daniel Kahneman, remarked of his groundbreaking work that he “merely studied in a systematic way things about behaviour that were already known to advertisers and used-car salesmen”.

If we want to understand those black-box parts of the brain, conventional research alone won’t cut it. The black box operates through instinctive feelings rather than thoughts or words, and is largely “opaque to introspection”. Moreover, because it is the product of evolution and not design, you must often start with observable behaviours and reverse-engineer the underlying mechanisms from there.