This week, as a result of falling down a deep youtube hole, I happened upon an eight minute standup routine by comedian Mekki Leeper. I noticed some resonances of concepts we’ve discussed in social psychology, so I thought I’d write about them here.
Representative Heuristic: Leeper opens his set by talking about his identity. While he is Moroccan, as he puts it, “Most of my family still lives over there, in Africa, so I don’t know why I look like this either.” At first glance, you wouldn’t necessarily think Leeper has an African background. He has light skin and brown eyes and hair, and if he didn’t tell you, you might assume he was white. If you did, you would be using the Representative Heuristic, or the tendency to presume that someone or something belongs to a particular group based on their resemblance to a typical member of that group. Here, Leeper uses your assumption to his advantage by joking about it. Leeper also talks about other people’s perception of his race later on in the set, citing people who ask him whether he experiences racism as an Arab: “You think I’m going around telling racist people my family’s Arab? No, they don’t think that I’m Arab. Honestly, racist people think that I’m racist. I’m trying to f***ing blend in here, everybody.” This second joke also relies on the representative heuristic. For the joke to work, we, the audience, assume the “racist people” Leeper refers to are white because we have learned to presume that those two categories are associated with one another — we place “white people” in the category of “racist” almost automatically. The people in the joke also exemplify this heuristic, because they, just as we may have when we saw Leeper walk out onstage, assume he is white based on his resemblance to a typical member of the group.
Base-Rate Fallacy: In fact, standup comedy as a genre relates pretty heavily on a social psychology concept for its success: the Base-Rate Fallacy. This concept basically means that as individuals, we are insensitive to consensus information, and we are influenced more by vivid stories, examples, or resemblance to categories. Since many jokes, like Leeper’s, rely on expectations and realities misaligning through the lens stereotypes, which are often communicated through personal anecdotes or exciting hypotheticals, the base-rate fallacy means that audiences will likely be influenced by these kinds of things, and perhaps be able to recall them more easily later than more general statistics.
socially psyched 