At Odds: Laughing and Thinking? The Appreciation, Processing, and Persuasiveness of Political Satire

What is it about?

This study constructs and tests a conceptual model of how and for whom political satire affects political attitudes. With an experiment, we show that young adults compared to older people are more absorbed in satirical items than in regular news. Subsequently, absorption decreased counterarguing such that the attitude toward the satirized object was affected negatively. By contrast, we show that political satire positively affects the attitude toward the satirized subject via perceived funniness; this was particularly strong among those who held views congruent with the satire or lacked background knowledge, which follows disposition theory. Investigating the underlying and conditional processes gave insight into mechanisms through which satire influences attitudes and pinpointed possible reasons for mixed effects of this infotainment genre.

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Why is it important?

Political satire more and more becomes the media through which citizens learn about political happenings. It is important to know how this may affect the public opinion, as this is the driver behind almost all political decisions.

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