#20 - So you think you're funny?
Why spaceflight requires you to have a healthy sense of humour.
‘One small step for man; one giant leap for mankind.’
Those are the famous words that Neil Armstrong shared with the world, as he and Buzz Aldrin took their first steps on our Moon in 1969.
But what wasn’t broadcast to the public were Buzz’s words that followed: ‘one giant leak for mankind.’
You see, Buzz had developed a small issue with his urine collection system. It was leaking into his suit, resulting in pee collecting in his space boot.
I myself came to learn first-hand recently that space missions, even analogue ones, require you to have a good sense of humour. Living in close proximity to six other human beings who I hadn’t met before the mission started, meant we had to get over our discomfort and embarrassment about, well, everything.
And just about the best way to do break that tension and stress was to laugh about it.
The use of humour as a coping strategy in spaceflight has been studied by psychologists Brcic and colleagues, back in 2018. They carried out a thematic content analysis of diaries and interviews from two groups of astronauts:
Sample 1 comprised 46 active astronauts and cosmonauts, who flew with NASA, RKA and other space agencies across a range of short and long flights.
Sample 2 comprised 20 retired Russian astronauts, of whom half had spent a total of more than a year in space.
Changes in coping strategies were examined over different time periods: in sample 1 it was pre, during and post flights, and in sample 2 it was before their space career, during and then after whilst in retirement. The method transformed the qualitative data into quantitive data by categorising different types of humour and measuring their frequency. The categories of humour were:
Affiliative: the enhancement of interpersonal cohesiveness and attraction, e.g. laughing and joking around others to put them at ease, telling jokes and funny stories
Aggressive: express humour without regard to its effect on others, e.g. teasing others, tells offensive jokes, using humour to criticise others
Self-enhancing: expressing a humorous outlook on life, e.g. cheering people up when depressed, when alone combats unhappiness with humorous thinking
Self-defeating: excessive use of self-disparaging humour, e.g. letting people laugh at them, using own weaknesses or blunders as butt of the joke
Coping: the degree to which humour is used to manage a stressful event, e.g. says something comical in tense situations, laughs when the choice is to do that or cry
It is perhaps unsurprising that all spacefarers used humour as a coping strategy, and they were overall much more likely to use it positively (affiliative, self-enhancing, coping) than negatively (aggressive, self-defeating). As a result, they reported feeling less depression, loneliness, stress, tension, and anxiety, and more togetherness, warmth, and friendliness.
However, what’s really interesting is when we dig into the detail. Sample 1 featured female astronauts (unlike sample 2 which was all men). Researchers found that women were less likely to use humour as a coping strategy than men. Other studies using brain imaging techniques found that men and women perceive humour differently: women use a larger amount of executive processing and language-based decoding when interpreting humour. The female astronauts may have avoided using humour with their male colleagues in case they were misunderstood.
Russian cosmonauts were also more likely to use humour as a coping strategy, and less likely as a way to bond with the rest of their crew compared to NASA astronauts. This could be due to cultural differences in the meaning and role of humour. A notable finding was that astronauts who were in the majority nationality in a crew used more aggressive humour than those in a minority, indicating group size had a factor on the particular use of humour.
The cosmonauts in the second sample also used humour as more of a coping strategy. Those with less space experience used humour less frequently, preferring to jump into problem-solving mode when there were stressful issues, than those with more experience. Perhaps with experience comes the ability to laugh at a situation? In addition, self-defeating humour increased across their careers: once cosmonauts felt they had achieved their career goals they felt they could relax and poke fun at themselves.
So what can we take from this study back to our workplace?
Humour can be a very effective coping mechanism, particularly when it makes light of stressful situations, or leads to more team bonding (how often do you hear people laughing in your workplace?)
Men and women use humour differently: women may be less inclined to tell jokes for fear of coming across in the wrong way (how are women using humour in your workplace?)
A majority group within a team will use more aggressive humour — watch out that the minority group is not the target of their jokes (observe those meetings when the men are all laughing at some ‘in joke’ and the women are… silent).
Reference
Brcic, J., Suedfeld, P., Johnson, P., Huynh, T., and Gushin, V. (2018) ‘Humor as a coping strategy in spaceflight’, Acta Astronautica, Vol 152, pp. 175-178
If you want to hear more about how humour is important for leaders, check out this episode of Joy at Work I recorded with the wonderful Lucia Knight.
