Reciprocal Humor Escalation
A self-reinforcing humorous exchange between a user and an AI system in which each party's playful turn prompts a further playful turn, lowering perceived tension. Distinguished from a single joke by its turn-to-turn escalation.
Operational Definition
EVENT. One occurrence would be coded when, within a dialogue transcript, a humorous turn by one party is followed by an on-topic humorous turn from the other party that explicitly builds on it, forming a run of at least two reciprocal humorous turns. The run is the unit counted; the first non-humorous or topic-resetting turn ends it.
Measurement Schema
Proposed measurement protocol (not yet empirically validated): Two raters annotate transcripts for reciprocal-humor runs and record run length (number of consecutive humorous turns); inter-rater agreement on run boundaries could be reported as Cohen's kappa. Could be reported as runs per 100 turns and mean run length.