Date of Award

Fall 2025

Document Type

Open Access Thesis

Department

Psychology

First Advisor

Amit Almor

Abstract

We report the results from three experiments examining people’s preferences for using sarcasm in conversation as a function of: 1. whether their interlocutor uses sarcasm during the conversation; 2. Their knowledge about whether the interlocutor has used sarcasm in a previous conversation; 3. The presence of prosodical and visual cues for interlocutors’ sarcasm. In each experiment, participants took part in two conversations, and we manipulated whether the interlocutors were sincere or sarcastic and whether they remained the same or changed from one conversation to the next. Experiment one used written conversations and experiment two and three used pre-recorded video clips of actors speaking the same conversational statements used in experiment one. In experiment two, we used female actors. In experiment three, we used one male and one female actor. In all experiments, participants were instructed to choose their most likely response to their interlocutor’s statement from among four possible responses that included one sarcastic response. In both conversations in both experiments, participants made more sarcastic choices when interacting with a sarcastic interlocutor. At the same time, there were no differences due to change of interlocutor from conversation one to conversation two. Finally, we found that participants were more likely to make sarcastic choices when responding to video clips (Experiment two) compared to written sentences (Experiment one). We argue this is related to the relationship between prosodical and visual cues and recognizing sarcasm. Overall, our results are consistent with predictions made by theories of dialogue that do not assume automatic adaptation to specific speakers, as well as previous research on the importance of prosody in sarcasm recognition and perception.

Rights

© 2025, Samantha Langley

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