Humor Self-Concepts and Personality: Locating Humor Efficacy and Identity Beliefs Within Extraversion, Openness, and Imagination

People’s beliefs about their ability to be funny, like their creative self-beliefs more generally, are important to understanding their creative goals, actions, and achievements in the domain of humor. Paralleling general creative self-concepts, humor self-concepts consist of humor self-efficacy (“I can” confidence beliefs about one’s ability to be funny) and humor identity (“I am” beliefs about the centrality of being funny to one’s sense of self). The present research explored how these beliefs relate to Extraversion and Openness to Experience, two major traits in humor research, and to a recent model of Imagination. An online sample of adults (n = 307) completed multiple measures of the many aspects and facets of these traits along with the Humor Efficacy and Identity Short Scales. Random forest models were used to disentangle the many correlated aspects and facets and to estimate their unique predictive importance. Humor self-efficacy was primarily marked by being intellectually imaginative and socially outgoing, and secondarily by being energetic, active, and assertive. Humor identity was primarily marked by being sociable and imaginative. These profiles reinforce the social nature of humor as a creative practice and suggest differences in how personality relates to humor beliefs versus humor abilities.