School friends learn humour from each other, research shows

A study by researchers from Goldsmiths, University of London, Keele University and the University of Strathclyde has shown how best friends at school learn humour from each other as time goes on, even if there were initially no similarities.

The study looked at the friendships between young people aged 11-13. Looking at four different humour styles based on a series of questions, researchers were able to examine the findings as part of a wider study to look at how young people cope with bullying.

While a pair might not pick each other as best friends because of humour, within six months psychologists saw significant similarities.

The study was led by Dr Claire Fox (Keele) with Dr Sian Jones (Goldsmiths, University of London, Department of Psychology) and Dr Simon Hunter (Strathclyde).

Dr Hunter said: “We were really surprised by the results. We’d thought that best friends would share a lot of their humour, but at the start of our study this was not the case at all. It does not seem to be the case that ‘birds of a feather flock together.

“However, we did find that best friends come to share one particular style of humour, called affiliative humour. This humour style usually involves humour that can enhance a relationship and the growth in this may explain why these pairs of young people were still friends after 6 months.

The different types of humour assessed were:

· Aggressive humour – “If someone makes a mistake, I will often tease them about it”

· Self-defeating humour – “I often try to get other people to like me more by saying something funny about things that are wrong with me or mistakes that I make”

· Self-enhancing humour – “If I am feeling sad I can cheer myself up by thinking of funny things”

· Affiliative humour – “I find it easy to make other people laugh” or “My jokes and funny stories make other people laugh.”

At the start of the school year, best friends did not share humour styles at all. For aggressive, self-defeating or self-enhancing humour, this was still the case at the end of the study.

For affiliative humour, which it is thought can help to build strong relationships, best friends seemed to mimic each other. They became more similar on affiliative humour across the six-month period of the study.

The survey, at schools in the Midlands, was published in the Journal of Adolescence. It concluded that positive humour between best friends might have a significant role in the development of young people’s friendships.