Sophie Scott

My father was a salesman and he was very good at using laughter socially.

He was funny and people liked him because he was funny and he would make people laugh.

He was a funny, witty man.

But I used to genuinely worry that people were buying... He sold carpets.

I was really worried that people would end up buying more carpets than they wanted to because...

He was making them laugh.

But I noticed even from a young age that he laughed completely differently when he was with his friends, mostly female friends.

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.