Sophie Scott

speaker

374 appearances 3 recordings 3 series first heard Jan 2026 last heard 2 Jul

Sophie Scott’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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3 Takeaways™ · The Surprising Science of Why We Laugh (#285) · 20 Jan 2026 podcast

But he had a handful, like most people do.

You don't have all that many really close friends.

And he laughed totally differently when he was with his close friends.

It was almost kittenish.

There was none of that kind of dominating, controlling the room sort of element to his laughter.

He was just delighted at being with his friends.

And I think everyone sort of has that.

You're laughing with a lot of different people, but you're laughing really intensely and in a really relaxed way, I think, or not with just anybody.

And I think that's, again, where some of the power of laughter comes because if you think of laughter as being a really effective way of making and maintaining social bonds, and that's, again, one of the things you find about laughter, wherever you find it, it's often playing this role.

I think they do.

If you think about contagion as being like that, so contagion, behavioral contagion, it's actually quite common in social animals.

So if you look at a behavior like yawning, yawning is very, very common in animals.

Many animals yawn, but lots of animals also yawn contagiously.

So they yawn just because they have seen or heard another conspecific yawning.

And it's a social signal.

It's a sign of affiliation.

And you find it in humans.

You find it in dogs and chimps.

You find it in turtles and budgerigars.

So that's really, really widespread.

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