An Extrovert and an Individualist Walk into a Bar: Cultural Influence on the Relationship between Personality and Humor Styles

A mediation analysis was conducted on 193 participants to find the influence of culture on the relationship between individual personality traits and individual styles of humor. We hypothesized that collectivism would positively influence affiliative and self-enhancing humor styles, and negatively influence self-deprecating and aggressive humor styles when mediated through extroversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, and openness. However, when mediated through neuroticism, collectivism would negatively influence affiliative and self- enhancing humor styles, and positively influence self-deprecating and aggressive humor styles. Results show that extroversion mediated a positive relationship between collectivism and affiliative humor style, and agreeableness mediated a negative relationship between collectivism and aggressive humor style. The results suggest that social traits extroversion and agreeableness influenced social humor styles affiliative humor and aggressive humor when correlated with collectivism. The weak percentage of these mediation analyses suggest that personality and collectivism might be mutually exclusive traits in the prediction of humor styles