Preregistration for 'How do Tertiary Students Adjust Their Humour Behaviours Across Ingroup/Outgroup membership and Relational Closeness?'

Humour is a strategic tool for social bonding (Crawford, 2002). In an intercultural context, humour may help in overcoming social barriers, depending on the dynamics of the relationships and cultural backgrounds of the involved individuals. (Nevo, Nevo & Yin, 2001; Holmes & Marra, 2002). Laughter is understood to be a social activity, with behavioural contagion linked to agreement, affiliation, and acknowlement of communication (Provine, 1993, Smoski,2003). Social Identity Theory has established that individuals alter their communication based on their interactions with an ingroup vs an outgroup, including their use of humour (Tajfel & Turner, 1979; Hay, 2001; Boxer & Cortés-Conde, 1997). Martin (2003) created the Humour Styles Questionnaire (HSQ) that categorised humour styles into four types: affiliative, self-enhancing, aggressive, and self-defeating. These styles are largely consistent personality traits that determine how people use humour to cope, relate, or distance themselves from others. Despite being a widely used tool for measuring trait-based humour styles, the Humour Styles Questionnaire (HSQ) does not account for the way humour behaviours change depending on the social situation, such as when interacting with members of the ingroup versus those of the outgroup or with friends versus strangers. In the current study, we aim to investigate how humour behaviours (positive vs negative humour directed towards self, the interlocutor, and an unrelated third-party) adapt depending on group membership (ingroup vs outgroup) and relational closeness (friend vs stranger), using a novel tool, a questionnaire about directed use of humour, with international students selected as the target 'ingroup'. Project initiated in the 2025-6 academic year. V2 corrects access permissions for the documents.