Satire “sharpens the blade” of criticism

The abundance of satirical memes, videos, and comedy channels mean that many of us are regularly exposed to this style of humorous critique. It would, therefore, be interesting to know how its impacts may differ from those of a more straightforward type of criticism. However, despite its prevalence in daily life, "academic efforts to understand satire in the psychological sciences are surprisingly sparse," note the authors of a recent paper in the Journal of Experimental Psychology: General.

Hooria Jazaieri at Santa Clara University and Derek D. Rucker at Northwestern University set out to start to address this by exploring the impact of satire on one particular factor: the reputation of the individual being targeted.

In the first stage of their study, they identified 40 YouTube videos that featured either satirical or direct criticism of a specific celebrity, concerning the same topic. For example, in 2014, the US NFL footballer Tom Brady was accused of instructing team members to deflate footballs. They picked out a satirical clip from the TV show Saturday Night Live in which Brady was targeted over this, and also a directly critical video that had been taken during a press conference.

A total of 1,311 online participants each viewed one of these videos. Then, they rated how critical they felt the video was of the target, and also the target's reputation on a scale from 1 (one of the worst) to 7 (one of the best).

The researchers' analysis showed that the satirical and the directly critical videos were viewed as being equally critical of the targets. However, participants who had watched the satirical versions rated the targets' reputations as being slightly worse than those who had watched the direct criticism. This result suggest that satire may "sharpen the blade" of criticism, causing more reputational damage, the pair writes.

The researchers also used software to analyse the content of 10,455 public comments posted by users in the comments section of these 40 videos. They found that for the satirical videos, the comments contained fewer humanising words — that is, words that reflected human qualities (such as feelings and agency), or that suggested the presence of a mental state. It's possible, they theorised, that satirical videos may be more damaging because they are more dehumanising.

Jazaieri and Rucker then ran six experiments that tested some of these relationships more directly.

In some, they used memes, instead of videos, of real or fictional people. The static images had taglines that were either satirical or directly critical, or contained no criticism at all. T Jazaieri and Rucker found that both satire and direct criticism damaged the target's reputation, but, again, "the bite of satire was sharper."

In another experiment, they directly explored the extent to which a target was 'dehumanised' following either type of criticism. They found that, as in their initial study, those who'd been exposed to a satirical style of criticism had a poorer estimation of a target's reputation. Their analysis also suggested that this was directly linked to a belief that the targeted individual had relatively fewer human qualities — that they were less capable of acting with intention, engaging in higher order thought, and feeling emotion. In this study, "we see direct evidence of the role of dehumanization in the relationship between satire and reputation," the pair writes.

Jazaieri and Rucker would now like to see further research exploring the impacts of satire versus direct criticism in other everyday settings, as well as a deeper dive into whether celebrities may be more or less vulnerable to satire than everyone else.

Given the results so far, though, it does seem that while satire may seem more innocuous than a rant, in some cases it can be, to use the researcher's words, "more incendiary".

It's worth adding that other research has found that critics who use satire tend to be viewed more favourably than people who gossip. So, as well as being more damaging to the target, a satirical approach may also make the critic less vulnerable to retaliation. This, though, may create an ethical issue, Jazaieri and Rucker write — as satire, as well as being more damaging, might make the person targeted by it less able to defend themselves.

Read the paper in full:
Jazaieri, H., & Rucker, D. D. (2025). Softening the blow or sharpening the blade: Examining the reputational effects of satire. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 154(5), 1201–1220. https://doi.org/10.1037/xge0001729

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