New PhD student at MGMT - Marc Hye-Knudsen

Hi everyone!

My name is Marc, and I am a new PhD student at the Department of Management as of September 1st, 2024. My research focuses on humor, and my PhD-project will specifically be aimed at examining the positive functions humor has in modern workplaces—and the negative consequences that can follow when it goes awry. Prior to joining MGMT as a PhD, I have worked for the last two years as lab manager at BSS’s Cognition and Behavior Lab. Hence, I am no stranger to the campus, and I already know and have worked with some of the great people here at MGMT, helping them run their experiments in the lab. My advisor is Christian Waldstrøm, and my co-supervisor is my former boss, lab director at the Cognition and Behavior Lab, Dan Mønster.

Although I have worked at BSS for the last two years, my master’s degree is actually from the Faculty of Arts, where I studied English and Scandinavian Languages and Literature. This is where I first became enamoured not just with studying humor but also with cognitive and evolutionary approaches to human behavior, in large part through working with Mathias Clasen, the co-director of Arts’s Recreational Fear Lab. My research into humor up until now has focused on humor largely from a cognitive and evolutionary perspective, and just prior to joining MGMT I have (almost) finished a large study on the common themes and functions of humor among hunter-gatherer peoples who live in conditions reminiscent of those in which humor originally evolved.

It is with great eagerness that I now turn to modern workplaces as the environment in which I will study humor. I am a fan of mixed-methods research designs that merge the best that quantitative and qualitative approaches have to offer, and I plan to employ both field studies, surveys, and experimental methods in examining humor’s place in modern work environments. There’s a lot of work to do, and I can’t wait to get started!