From ‘I’ to ‘We’: The Role of Putdown Humor and Identity in the Development of a Temporary Group
通过观察一个为期6周的高管发展课程，研究了贬低式幽默如何帮助临时群体建立群体身份和凝聚力，发现共享贬低式幽默及其隐含规则能促进团结。
Participant observation of a 6-week Executive Development Course suggests that humor provides a key mechanism for enacting a sense of community for group members. Specifically, the study examines the process through which putdown humor helps foster group identity and cohesion in a temporary group. Putdowns followed a pattern of development that signaled increasing trust and inclusion, and was regulated by implicit rules that incubated the emergent solidarity. The meaning of certain humorous episodes was equivocal, but the act of laughing together glossed over the equivocality so that the sense of community was reaffirmed. Further, social identity dynamics appeared to strongly affect perceptions of the appropriateness of humor. The authors conclude that shared putdown humor and the implicit set of rules regarding its use may facilitate solidarity, and they attempt to reconcile why ‘inclusionary putdowns’ were found here when ‘exclusionary putdowns’ are usually reported in the literature.