"Ok Boomer": The Influence of Humour on Intergenerational Hostility and Polarisation

In Britain and elsewhere, age is an increasingly relevant demarcator of political attitudes and behaviours. Young people espouse distinctive preferences from older cohorts, which is often combined with rising antagonism between the two generations. This antagonism is attributed to diverging attitudes towards sociocultural issues, but also to the perceived inequality in the financial opportunities that previous and current generations have been afforded. On the one hand, there is a growing bulk of research on the extent to which there is indeed a generational wealth gap, and what its political implications are. On the other hand, it has also become the subject of thousands of internet jokes that highlight the discrepancy between, e.g., the homeownership opportunities afforded to the Baby-Boom generation and the lack of these for Millennials, as well the difference in living costs and employment prospects experienced by the two generations. As younger generations increasingly consume political content online, and as these jokes are widely circulated across social media platforms, they constitute useful material to examine the effect of these types of humorous remarks on political attitudes and participation. We do so by employing an experimental design, whereby respondents from a representative sample of the British population (N=2054) are randomly displayed stimulus material that contains either age-based humorous or policy content, with the aim of testing how these different ways of conveying the same information affect political attitudes and participation, as well as intergenerational hostility and polarisation.