People think they’re funny, cars get stuck, poems map space

self-rated humour – A new study probes why most people rate their own humor as above average, a fresh geoscience take turns Dante’s Satan into an impactor, and a Waymo “routing problem” reportedly trapped driverless cars in an Atlanta cul-de-sac loop.

On a week when most science papers seem content to stay inside their spreadsheets, Feedback received something that made the newsroom feel… vaguely queasy.

The message pointed to a study by social psychologist Paul Silvia at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and his colleagues. titled “Who laughs at their own jokes?. Metacognitive judgments of self-rated funniness in creative humor production tasks”. It doesn’t look, at first glance, like the kind of work that usually lands emotionally. But the questions it asks are hard to shrug off: if people can’t help viewing themselves as funny. what happens when they’re judging their own jokes?.

The paper throws the dilemma right at the reader. When we imagine someone who thinks they’re hilarious and laughs at their own jokes. Silvia and his team say we might picture “an insufferable ex-boyfriend [or] a parent armed with a book of dad jokes.” The scene Feedback couldn’t shake was the one that comes with that mental framing—David Brent/Michael Scott. depending on which reference you can’t stop seeing.

From there, the study builds a case that most people see their sense of humor as better than average. Silvia and his team point to stats from a classic study where fewer than 2 per cent of participants rated their sense of humour as below average.

But the authors don’t stop at “people think they’re funny.” They push harder. arguing that “the concept of a ‘sense of humor. ’ however. is so abstract. ill-defined. and difficult to disconfirm” that it becomes “a perfect vessel for someone’s unrealistic and self-enhancing beliefs.” Feedback wasn’t looking for a verdict on its own personality—yet the language made it feel as if the ground under the jokes might be tilting.

The experiments described in the paper ask participants for humorous responses to prompts. then have them rate how funny those responses are. One example prompt asks people to imagine eating at a new food truck: after the cook hands over disgusting food. the participant turns to a friend and says. “….”.

The results cut in the direction many readers might expect, even if they’d rather not think about it. People rate their ideas as funnier if they have higher confidence. if they believe they are generally funny. if they scored higher on personality traits like extraversion and narcissism. and—regardless of whether anyone wants to add it to the list—“when they identified as male.”.

For Feedback, the takeaway is complicated. It’s not that everyone is laughing at themselves to inflate their ego. It’s that the study offers a path for self-assessment to drift from what others would actually find funny.

If there is any comfort, it’s the paper’s implicit contrast with Feedback’s own self-image. Readers may feel relief that the newsroom team isn’t like that imagined “insufferable” joker. Still. the study does its damage in a specific way: it doesn’t tell you what Feedback would say to the food-truck prompt. It just leaves the feeling that maybe confidence is doing some of the comedy’s work.

The week didn’t stay inside humor, either.

A second item came via a press release about Timothy Burbery’s talk at the European Geoscience Union’s annual meeting in May. The talk’s title—“Meteoritics and Dante’s Inferno: Examining Satan’s fall as an impact event”—sounds like it belongs in a late-night bookshop. until the press release starts treating it as science.

Burbery, who is at Marshall University in West Virginia, has taken a fresh look at Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy. Before the story’s events, Satan has fallen from heaven into hell. Burbery’s focus, the release says, is the “geophysical elements of Satan’s fall from Heaven.”

Then the talk lays out its premise. “Dante envisioned Satan as a high-velocity impactor hitting the Southern Hemisphere and tunnelling to the Earth’s centre. ” the press release says. Burbery. the release continues. suggests treating the Prince of Darkness as an oblong. asteroid-sized body—explicitly comparing it to the Hoba meteorite. described as a 60-ton intact mass. In that framing, “Dante’s Satan is modelled as a physical, un-vaporized impactor that permanently restructured the Earth’s architecture.”.

From there comes the reinterpretation. “In this light. the nine circles of Hell are no longer merely symbolic tiers of sin. ” the release argues. “but rather a remarkably accurate description of the concentric. terraced morphology found in multi-ring impact basins across the solar system. from the Moon to Venus.”.

Feedback isn’t ready to sign off on Dante as a planetary-impact report. But the push is unmistakable: the same text can be made to carry a radically different reading, and the story either becomes math—or stays poetry—depending on where you decide to put the emphasis.

And then there was the literal “loop.”

“Empty Waymos invade Atlanta neighborhood, keep circling cul-de-sac,” a headline from 15 May in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced. The situation. described in the reporting and shown in footage on BBC News. came down to a “routing problem.” The driverless cars allegedly got stuck in a loop. endlessly circling a cul-de-sac. reversing. and blocking one another—getting in another Waymo’s way and then doing it again for hours.

Feedback’s response was brutally practical. It can generally get out of a cul-de-sac in two or three attempts. The cars, running on automation, apparently didn’t have that instinct. One Bluesky user described the scene with a neat line: “traffic without transportation.”

Taken together, the week’s oddities share a theme that isn’t about jokes or poetry or driverless cars at all—it’s about how quickly people trust what they think is reasonable, and how easily systems, including human ones, can keep repeating the same assumption until reality forces a correction.

Got a story for Feedback? Send it by email at feedback@newscientist.com. Please include your home address. This week’s and past Feedbacks are also available on the publication’s website.

humor psychology Paul Silvia self-rated funniness University of North Carolina at Greensboro Dante's Inferno impact events Timothy Burbery European Geoscience Union Waymo Atlanta cul-de-sac routing problem