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Giggling in the Shower: Humor Increases the Acceptance of Technology-mediated Behavioral Interventions.

Published: 11 May 2024 Publication History

Abstract

One way to achieve sustainability is to adopt resource-saving practices. This often requires giving up cherished routines, which can be challenging. Behavior Change Technologies or automation can facilitate this, but will inevitably introduce friction that can be perceived as unpleasant or annoying. To alleviate this, we suggest humor as a promising design element. In an explorative study (N=349), we gathered participants’ responses (e.g., experience of humor, evaluation, and affect) when confronted with verbal descriptions of different interventions that interrupt the shower routine by stopping water in a humorous way. We found that the participants’ preferred style of humor was related to their experience of humor, with a focus on self-related rather than interpersonal humor. More importantly, the experience of humor was positively associated with the evaluation of the intervention and the resulting affective experience. This suggests that experience of humor can make a potentially neutral or slightly negative situation positive.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    CHI EA '24: Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
    May 2024
    4761 pages
    ISBN:9798400703317
    DOI:10.1145/3613905
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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    Published: 11 May 2024

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    Author Tags

    1. behavior change technology
    2. humor
    3. sustainability

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 6,164 of 23,696 submissions, 26%

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