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.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 3 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
So we teach babies to do these contagious behaviors.
And then that becomes a very, actually it's a very important aspect of social interactions.
The ability to mirror laughter back at each other very effectively is a great way for laughter to spread in a group of people.
And it's also a great way of, if you think about it, it's having this very important affiliative role
It's a great way of sort of getting that affiliative mirroring running in a very unconscious way.
People very rarely notice that they're doing it.
If you ask them why they're doing it, they will come up with a reason.
They'll say, well, that was funny.
But in fact, it wasn't.
It was just contagion.
Definitely.
If you think of that use of laughter to regulate emotions, so to deal with stressful situations, that's actually quite a common use of laughter.
We don't worry about it when it works.
But it can be a way that some people will laugh to deal with sometimes with situations that are quite serious.
When Roger, I'm going to say his name wrong, that man at Fox who had been a serial harasser of female colleagues, they made the film Bombshell about it.
And then in 2016, lots of women started to tell their stories.
And he had quite a formal way of sort of propositioning women.
And the number of women who said when he propositioned them that they'd laughed was
And they were laughing to try and de-escalate that situation to say, I know you don't mean it.
I know that you're just kidding.
Showing 241–260 of 374 · page 13 of 19
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