Your Photo is so Funny that I don't Mind Violating Your Privacy by Sharing it: Effects of Individual Humor Styles on Online Photo-sharing Behaviors

We investigate how people’s ‘humor style’ relates to their online photo-sharing behaviors and reactions to ‘privacy primes’. In an online experiment, we queried 437 participants about their humor style, likelihood to share photo-memes, and history of sharing others’ photos. In two treatment conditions, participants were either primed to imagine themselves as the photo-subjects or to consider the photo-subjects’ privacy before sharing memes. We found that participants who frequently use aggressive and self-deprecating humor were more likely to violate others’ privacy by sharing photos. We also replicated the interventions’ paradoxical effects – increasing sharing likelihood – as reported in earlier work and identified the subgroups that demonstrated this behavior through interaction analyses. When primed to consider the subjects’ privacy, only humor deniers (participants who use humor infrequently) demonstrated increased sharing. In contrast, when imagining themselves as the photo-subjects, humor deniers, unlike other participants, did not increase the sharing of photos.