Jerry Suls

Who they are: Jerry Suls is a social psychologist (Ph.D., Temple University) at the University of Iowa, whose research spans social comparison, health psychology, stress and personality. Early in his career he developed one of the most widely cited cognitive models of humor.

The concept HaELM draws from: in “A Two-Stage Model for the Appreciation of Jokes and Cartoons” (1972, in The Psychology of Humor, edited by Goldstein and McGhee), Suls argued that humor and surprise work in two steps — first noticing an incongruity, something that breaks the pattern you expected, then resolving it by finding the rule that makes it make sense. Decode uses this incongruity-resolution model to explain why a mismatch holds attention until the viewer works out why it is there.

Decode articles where their thinking appears: Spider-Man: Brand New Day × Google Maps: A Film Promotion Built into a Daily Habit

Source: Society for Personality and Social Psychology profile, “Jerry Suls”; Suls (1972), in The Psychology of Humor (Academic Press).