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 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

And that's actually very effective because that just leans into the fact that laughter is highly contagious.

A lot of the laughter we produce is happening just because we've heard or seen somebody else laughing.

And if you watch a video of somebody desperately trying to do a broadcast while they're really trying not to laugh, the laughter keeps coming through.

there's strong clues that that's spontaneous laughter, that is authentic laughter, but also they're desperately trying to cover it up, which makes it almost funnier than if they just started laughing.

So that works very, very well to get people laughing.

And it doesn't require you to find anything funny and it doesn't require you to know any of the people involved.

So a lot of the ones we use are actually from the US.

So the people in the UK don't know who those people are, but they still laugh when they start laughing.

Are people who laugh a lot happier?

Yeah.

Very, very hard to know.

So everybody underestimates how often they laugh.

There aren't many studies on this, but every study that has got people to give a rating of how often they laugh and then actually observes them, finds that everybody is under-reporting their laughter.

It's like we don't remember it almost.

So it's difficult because you can't rely on people's self-report.

We've been developing a questionnaire about laughter and we found that the single biggest factor

that sort of varies across certainly adults in the UK and in China about laughter is how much people think they laugh.

So it is a big thing that people think about their laughter and how much they do or don't laugh a lot.

But we can't find any predicted value of that.

So there's no relationship that we found so far between how much people think they laugh and how much they actually do laugh.

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