Chapter 1: What is the surprising role of laughter in our daily lives?
We tend to think of laughter as a reaction to something funny, a punchline, a joke, a moment of humor. But when you listen to laughter in real everyday conversations, a much stranger picture starts to emerge. So if laughter isn't really about humor, what is it for? And why does laughter matter more than we think? Hi, everyone. I'm Lynn Thoman, and this is Three Takeaways.
On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better. Today, I'm excited to be with neuroscientist Sophie Scott. She studies the science of laughter.
Chapter 2: Why is laughter considered a social behavior?
It turns out that everything we think we know about laughter is wrong. Laughter is not even primarily a response to humor. I'm excited to learn more. Welcome, Sophie, and thanks so much for our conversation today. Hello, and thank you very much for inviting me. Why is laughter worth taking seriously?
I think because it's probably one of the more important emotional expressions that we use socially. If you ask people about what makes them laugh, they'll talk about comedy and jokes and humor. But if you actually look at people, what they do is they laugh when they're in company. Laughter is a social behavior.
Chapter 3: How does laughter help reduce stress in social interactions?
You are 30, three zero times more likely to laugh if there's somebody else with you than if you're on your own. And you'll laugh more if you know those people and you'll laugh more if you like those people. And that's why you shouldn't think of it as an expression of amusement, actually, because most of the time laughter has got nothing whatsoever to do with jokes. It's a social joy.
It's a joy that you experience when you're with other people. So I think you can think of laughter as being an expression of a sort of playful, socially delightful joy. It's something you experience when you're with other people. Now, that might be on a screen or it might be in real life, but there has to be that sense of a social connection for it to start happening.
It's possible to laugh on your own. It's just much less likely.
Chapter 4: What factors influence how and when we laugh?
So I think from that perspective, it's really worth valuing laughter and taking laughter seriously because it's an emotional expression, but it's one that lives in social interactions. And that makes it very, very interesting because unlike emotions like, say, fear and disgust or surprise, I was once walking down the street and slipped on some ice.
I didn't completely fall over, but I slipped enough. I completely produced an involuntary vocalization of surprise. Oh, like that. Absolutely involuntary. And there's nothing social about that at all. That was just an emotion. I was just being driven off because I don't know quite where this is going, but something's happening. Laughter doesn't work that way.
Laughter, you do find that people laugh when they're on their own, but it's much, much less likely. It's primarily happening in these social interactions. Yeah. And it's happening in a highly communicative way as well as a sort of basic emotional expression way. So people will use laughter to show that they know and they're affiliated with the people that they're talking to.
And also it's worth taking seriously because it works. We will use laughter for lots of different reasons, but a really important reason why humans will use laughter is to reduce stress. And it's very effective at that as long as everybody joins in. If you share laughter together, you will feel better together.
Chapter 5: How does laughter function in high-stress professions?
You can actually use it to negotiate a better mood together, which makes it a very important emotion. So if you want people to laugh, what do you do? It's interesting because there's no one thing that everybody finds funny. And that's like a truism for humor. There is no one joke everybody finds funny. There's no one comedian everybody finds funny.
Even slapstick humor, which is much more broad in its reach. There'll be somebody somewhere going, that's not funny. My brother died that way. So I don't try to get people laughing nowadays when I'm doing things in the lab. I don't bother trying to use humor at all. What we use are videos of normally television presenters who get the giggles while they're broadcasting.
And they have to keep talking because they're on air. 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.
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Chapter 6: What are the physiological effects of laughter on our bodies?
So the people in the UK don't know who those people are, but they still laugh when they start laughing.
So interesting.
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. But I think the other thing that's true is if you remember that laughter doesn't happen randomly. Laughter happens when you're in certain social situations.
And people won't laugh if they're feeling really uncomfortable, even if they're with other people. And they won't laugh if they're feeling very kind of exposed or like they're on show. So one of the easiest ways to get people to stop laughing is to get them into the lab and say, now laugh. They just don't do it.
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Chapter 7: Can laughter be used transactionally in serious situations?
They won't do it. So I think it's possible that people who are happier laugh more. It's also possible that people who laugh more are happier. The direction of causality is probably more like a virtuous circle, both affects the other. But all of it's only possible because of the people that you're laughing with. That's going to be affecting your mood as well. I can remember when I was a child,
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.
Chapter 8: What are the key insights about laughter and its impact on relationships?
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.
Do people in conversation mirror each other in laughter also?
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. And there are quite a lot of behaviours that work this way. So blinking is quite contagious. Coughing is contagious. Scratching is contagious. It's pretty complex. If you look at orangutans, they scratch contagiously.
Actually, it's a sign of anxiety in orangutans. If an orangutan is scratching itself, that means it's anxious. If another orangutan picks up that, it mirrors back that scratching. They're basically indicating, oh yeah, I know what you mean. This isn't great. You have this whole world of contagious behaviours and they tend to have this affiliative element to them. And it's also true for laughter.
However, humans are the only animals where contagious laughter has been shown. So other animals laugh, but they don't laugh contagiously. They don't just catch a laugh, which makes it very interesting, partly also because it's something we learn to do. So contagious behaviors are not things we're born doing. Babies don't blink unless they need to refresh their eyes.
They don't yawn when somebody else yawns. They don't laugh when somebody else laughs. 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.
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