Sophie Scott

You're excluding people with the darkness of the thing that you're laughing at and the really specific job-related aspects of that.

I don't think that's random.

It's meant to be a bit shocking to other people because this is actually, you're the team that has to work together.

They are the outsiders.

They don't understand.

There is a literature describing this.

And over the past couple of years, there's been a number of cases in the UK where WhatsApp groups between police officers have been made public and revealing awful things like some horrible crime scene where two sisters were killed in a park in the middle of London in a very public place.

And it was a very, very horrible thing.

And one of the police officers who had to stand guard over the scene took inappropriate photographs and put them on the WhatsApp group of this crime scene.

I absolutely guarantee you they were trying to be funny.

It doesn't make it funny, but I'm certain that's what the intent was.

And that's one of the reasons why it's so shocking.

I'm not saying it's right at all, but that's, I think, an extreme example of this crime.

what you find in high stress jobs, which often is this very dark sense of humor, which is still aimed at getting laughter, but also really in an exaggerated way, keeping other people out.

People always want to know if it's different between men and women.

Pretty much everything I've talked about here is the same for men and women.

The only thing that comes up a bit is that everybody laughs more contagiously with someone they know than someone they don't know.

Male and female familiarity absolutely rules for contagious laughter.

I think women may have learned to use laughter as perhaps a way of managing situations with unfamiliar men who can be something of a little bit of a mixed bag.

The first one is laughter is never neutral.