Irony Across Cultures: A Contrastive Analysis of Conceptualizations and Social Functions

This chapter presents a distinction between individualistic versus collectivistic cultures based on communication styles. In particular, this distinction involves the concept of “face” and cultural communicative preferences for, respectively, negative politeness and positive politeness. In light of this distinction, the chapter further investigates four social aspects of irony: (a) humor, (b) status enhancement, (c) aggression, and (d) emotional control. In a series of pilot studies, the perception of these social aspects was tested in two groups of participants coming from individualistic versus collectivistic cultures and responding to both critical and praise irony. The results suggest that the individualistic group found the ironic utterances funnier and more status enhancing than the collectivistic group. While no statistically significant difference was found for aggression ratings, the results revealed that in the individualistic group, irony was rated as more face-threatening when a person’s poor performance was targeted, while in the individualistic group, this effect occurred when moral behavior was targeted rather than the situation.