From the typical studious student to the class clown, every classroom brings many personalities to the table. While studious students are valued highly by their peers and teachers as intelligent, class clowns are rarely considered as such.
Contrary to popular belief, “class clowns” are the smartest people in the class. A new study titled “Are more humorous children more intelligent?” A case from Turkish culture” corroborates this claim and lays the groundwork for reevaluating classroom humor.
The Consensual Assessment Technique (CAT) was employed by a panel of seven professionals, including cartoonists and humor educators, to evaluate the captions that 217 students had written for 10 cartoons on humor and comedic value metrics.
According to the research findings, intellect and sense of humor are significantly associated. An increase in a person’s intellect leads to an increase in their ability to have a sense of humor. Additionally, the capacity to verbally reason by analogy is the intellectual talent that most accurately predicts a person’s sense of humor.
The significance of the study is grounded in the fact that the contribution of intellect to humor may be substantially larger than the results of previous studies. However, the study is not exactly representative of all cultures or the full truth as it has a couple of limitations.
Firstly, the study is culturally relativistic. Humor is different across cultures, and the association of intelligence with humor must be studied respectively to a particular culture.
Secondly, the authors rightly mention that the data collection measures used in this study might be more connected than in previous studies, inflating the correlation between the two domains.
Despite limitations, the study will aid educators in stepping away from stereotypes about the diverse range of personalities in the classroom and rethinking humor.
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