Humor Style
Affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive or self-defeating?
Free, no account needed.
Everyone laughs, but not everyone uses humor the same way. Some people joke to bring others together, some to keep their own spirits up, some to tease, and some to make themselves the punchline. This test maps which of these four humor styles you lean on, and where your humor sits between serving yourself and serving your relationships, and between gentle and biting.
Answer for how you actually joke and laugh in everyday life, with friends, family and colleagues, not how you wish you did. A few questions describe situations: pick the response closest to your first instinct.
What it measures
Affiliative
Humor used to amuse others, ease tension and bring people together.
Low: You rarely joke to entertain or bond; you may prefer sincere talk or enjoy being the audience.
High: You use humor as social glue: stories, banter and in-jokes that make people feel part of the group.
Self-enhancing
Humor used to cope: an amused outlook that keeps your spirits up when things go wrong.
Low: When life goes badly, your sense of humor tends to go quiet until the trouble has passed.
High: You can find the absurd side of setbacks, even alone, and it helps you keep perspective.
Aggressive
Humor at others' expense: teasing, sarcasm and ridicule, used to amuse yourself or to put someone in their place.
Low: You keep jokes that could wound to yourself and rarely laugh at anyone's expense.
High: Your wit has an edge: you tease, mock and deliver sharp comebacks, even when someone may be hurt.
Self-defeating
Humor at your own expense: putting yourself down to win laughs or approval, or joking to avoid showing what you feel.
Low: You rarely make yourself the punchline, and you do not let others make you the butt of the joke for long.
High: You often joke about your own flaws and troubles, sometimes to be liked and sometimes to hide how you feel.
Focus
Self ↔ Others
Whom your humor mainly serves: your own mood and standing (self-enhancing and aggressive humor), or your bonds with other people (affiliative and self-defeating humor).
Self: Your humor mostly works for you: it keeps your spirits up or wins you the upper hand.
Others: Your humor mostly works for the relationship: it connects, pleases and smooths things over.
Tone
Gentle ↔ Biting
Whether your humor is benign, or carries an edge that wounds someone, others or yourself.
Gentle: Your humor is kind: it laughs with people and at life, rarely at anyone.
Biting: Your humor has teeth: it often costs someone something, a target or yourself.
Possible results
About this test
The humor styles model was developed by the Canadian psychologist Rod Martin and colleagues (Martin, Puhlik-Doris, Larsen, Gray and Weir, 2003). Earlier research had treated "sense of humor" as a single trait that was simply good for you. Martin's team asked instead how people use humor, and found four styles arranged on two axes: whether humor serves the self or one's relationships, and whether it is benign or potentially harmful. Affiliative humor (joking to bring people together) and self-enhancing humor (an amused outlook used for coping) are benign; aggressive humor (teasing, sarcasm, ridicule) and self-defeating humor (putting yourself down for laughs or to hide what you feel) carry costs, to others or to yourself.
Across many studies the benign styles go with well-being, optimism and satisfying relationships, the aggressive style with hostility and conflict, and the self-defeating style with lower self-esteem and low mood, even though self-defeating jokers can come across as witty and fun to be around. Later work has added nuance: mild self-mockery can be healthy, and cluster studies find people who use all four styles a lot or very little.
This test uses original items, scores each style from 0 to 100 and places you on Martin's two axes. Your result is your strongest style, or a blend if you use all four heavily or sparingly. Scores are relative to the answer range, not population norms. Self-report of humor is tricky, as people often misjudge how their jokes land, and humor depends on culture and company, so treat the result as a mirror, not a verdict.
References
- Martin, R. A., Puhlik-Doris, P., Larsen, G., Gray, J. & Weir, K. (2003). Individual differences in uses of humor and their relation to psychological well-being: Development of the Humor Styles Questionnaire. Journal of Research in Personality, 37, 48-75.
- Martin, R. A. & Ford, T. E. (2018). The Psychology of Humor: An Integrative Approach (2nd ed.).
- Galloway, G. (2010). Individual differences in personal humor styles: Identification of prominent patterns and their associates. Personality and Individual Differences, 48, 563-567.
- Heintz, S. & Ruch, W. (2015). An examination of the convergence between the conceptualization and the measurement of humor styles. Humor, 28, 611-633.
For self-reflection and curiosity, not diagnosis. Scores describe how you answered, relative to the possible range; they are not compared with population norms.
Humor Style
About 5 minutes · 32 questions
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