Imagine you are dozing off in lecture when a change of pace brings you back—a video is to be shown. The opening scene depicts a little girl picking petals off a daisy. As she counts and the camera zooms in on her face, a chuckle escapes one of your classmates. Silence follows until an overpowering countdown begins that ends with a nuclear explosion. Suddenly, the room is full of laughter that only seems to augment with the message: “We must either love each other, or we must die… Vote for President Johnson on November 3.” Amidst this scene, you find yourself laughing—something you had not done the first time you watched this ad alone. Why? What is it about being in a group that makes us laugh?
Before delving into the impact of group dynamics on laughter, it is essential to start with a fundamental question: ‘Why do we laugh or what makes something humorous?’ For centuries this inquiry has puzzled philosophers, and, in the process, one theory has become central to the study—The Incongruity Theory (IT, hereafter). In short, IT posits that the violation and enjoyment of one’s mental expectations will result in laughter. Mental expectations are to be understood as philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer describes them—namely, the grouping of our sense perceptions under abstract concepts. This means that the ideas that exist in one’s mind, in relation to any given object, are generalizations that never grasp all the qualities of said object. In effect, humor occurs when there is a mismatch between the actual object and the idea one holds of it. Take this Austrian joke for example:
When someone had declared that he was fond of walking alone, an Austrian said to him: “You like walking alone; so do I: therefore we can go together” (Schopenhauer, 1883, p. xx).
In this instance, the mental expectation follows the conception that something two people love can be done together. The violation occurs when this idea is subsumed under an excluding instance: they each enjoy walking alone (Morreall, 2023). Kierkegaard further supports this understanding of humor by affirming that the essence of humor arises from the disparity between what is expected and what is experienced, what he calls ‘contradiction’ —another term for IT (Morreall, 2023). This leads us to question the relationship between being in a group and IT.
Dr. Chris Kramer, Professor of Philosophy at Rock Valley College, writes that, in order for incongruities to be recognized, different perspectives on reality need to be made available. He then states that lacking interactions with others in the search for incoherence results in a spirit of seriousness. This, in turn, can foster a disposition that ignores incongruity. (Kramer, 2015, p. 4). This understanding of incongruity suggests that being in a group can potentially alter the way someone comes to perceive certain information and/or instances.
A now-classic study known as the conformity experiments conducted by Solomon Asch, a pioneer in social psychology, can be used to further Kramer’s conclusion. The study followed 50 male college students who were told they’d be participating in a ‘vision test.’ Asch then divided the participants into groups of eight: one naive participant with seven actors (known as confederates). Unbeknownst to the real participants, the confederates had been given prior instruction on how to respond to each task. Each person was then told to state aloud which line (A, B or C) matched the target line—the real participant being the last. At the start, all participants gave the correct answers and after a few rounds, the confederates began to provide wrong answers. After 18 trials, the study concluded that on average, 32% of the participants conformed with the incorrect majority, 75% conformed at least once, and 25% never conformed (Asch, 1961, p. 231). Conformity was then observed to be a result of two reasons: normative influence and informational influence. Focusing on the latter reveals that individuals are prone to change their beliefs when they experience uncertainty and others hold assertive views. This observation even extended to participants believing that incorrect answers were, in fact, correct. In relation to IT, this study indicates that being in a group can produce more laughter because mental violations or incongruities are more likely to be detected. While sometimes incongruities can be overlooked when alone, being in a group increases their apparentness because of underlying reasons such as informational influence.
The laughter that results from noticing incongruity also plays a significant role in group dynamics, as the sound of a chuckle can be contagious. Dr. Sophie Scott, a Wellcome Trust Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience conducted a study on behavioral responses to auditory signals alongside researchers at University College London and Imperial College London. The study found that laughter triggers a response in a listener’s brain that seemingly prepares facial muscles for laughter (Warren et al., 2006). Within the study, a series of sounds were played whilst measuring the volunteers brain’s response using an fMRI scanner. Some sounds were unpleasant, such as screaming or retching while others were positive, such as laughter or cheering. All the sounds triggered a response in the premotor cortical region which prepares facial muscles to act accordingly. However, positive sounds revealed greater responses as opposed to negative sounds— an indication of their contagiousness (Warren et al., 2006). “We usually encounter positive emotions, such as laughter or cheering, in group situations, whether we are watching a comedy program with family or a game with friends,” Scott said. “This response in the brain, automatically priming us to smile or laugh, provides a way to mirror the behavior of others, something which helps us interact socially.”
The shared chuckling sounds that arise from neurological functions can also contribute to feelings of bonding, further facilitating social interactions. Researchers at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, explored how laughter can function as a social glue. By producing shared laughter in the lab, researchers were able to measure its impacts on relationships (Suttie, 2017). In this study participants were shown three videos, a funny, kind of funny and not funny one. While viewing, participants were supposed to video-chat with another same-sex participant who unbeknownst to them, had been pre-recorded. The video-chat displayed someone laughing for the first two videos and only smiling in the last. A questionnaire succeeded the experience in an effort to record participants’ emotions, sense of similarity felt to their partner and whether they would like to meet them. Results consistently showed that shared laughter increased both a sense of similarity and likeability. Two other surveys were conducted, which asked participants to recall recent interactions with someone close to them. Importantly, these results too, showed that shared laughter fostered increasingly positive emotions (Kurtz & Algoe, 2016). Social psychologist and co-author of the study, Sara Algoe, noted that, “For people who are laughing together, shared laughter signals that they see the world in the same way, and it momentarily boosts their sense of connection.”
A 2017 study published in the Journal of Neuroscience, furthers this finding of increased sociability. In the study, two close friends were instructed to watch a set of comedy clips together for 30 min. Each participant underwent a PET scan, one before the clips (neutral baseline scan) and one after (social laughter scan) (Manninen et al., 2017). “Whole-brain analysis of the PET data revealed that social laughter increased endogenous opioid release in several brain regions involved in processing rewards” (Manninen et al., 2017). Researchers in this study concluded that the release of endorphins as a result of social laughter, can prove a powerful way for modulating bonds in groups.
In effect, such social laughter can enable individuals to be accepted and form part of certain groups. Humans live in social groups that constantly require invested behavior to create bonds. In anthropoid primates, such as monkeys and apes, social grooming is the means by which bonds are formed and sustained. ‘By leafing through each other’s fur, primates’ low threshold afferent c-fibre mechanoreceptors activate c-tactile neurons (Dunbar, 2022). From here, upregulation of the brain’s endorphin system takes place and an opiate–like response is produced,’ (Dunbar, 2022). In humans, PET-scans have demonstrated that slow stroking also results in endorphin uptake—an indicator of the same system being involved in human social touch. Yet, unlike primates, endorphin activation through grooming would be insufficient for human social bonding in large groups(Dunbar, 2022). Researcher, R.I.M Dunbar from the University of Oxford, conducted a study that suggests laughter evolved with the Homo genus, as a means to facilitate social bonding of large groups.
By calculating grooming requirements for different Homo groups, Dunbar found that early Homo’s would have needed modest increases in social time to support larger groups– whereas archaic humans would require significant increases (Dunbar, 2022). This suggests that laughter emerged in response to the demands of early Homo rather than archaic humans (Dunbar, 2022). If this is true, as noted by Dunbar, ‘then laughter evolved before language—something that explains why language is not essential for laughter.’ In modern times, laughter has become the means by which group belonging and feelings of closeness emerge. It seems, then, that behavioral patterns of ancestral humans, especially with the appearance of the genus Homo, would adopt laughter as a means to increase group size when expanding into more predator-risky habitats (Dunbar, 2022).
Being accepted into a group, then, constitutes the important evolutionary advantage of forming an alliance and guaranteeing safety. Professor Joan B. Silk, from the University of California, Los Angeles, conducted research into the evolutionary forces that favored large brains in the primate order. In referencing the social brain hypothesis, which is the correlation between social group size and neocortex size in primates (Dunbar, 2016), Silk indicates that the quality of social relationships between ancestral humans became measurable fitness consequences for individuals (Silk, 2007). As more complex social structures formed, “evolution would have favored the development of cognitive strategies that would lead to the formation of alliances” (Raine, 2016). Just like sharing vital resources, might have led to stronger social bonds, laughter would serve the role of facilitating bonds of trust amongst early humans.
Overall, as humans, laughing more in a group gives rise to a complexity of notions that add a deeper meaning to our nature. From violating expectations that give rise to humor, to catching a chuckle and experiencing a sense of bonding, acceptance, and safety; laughter is an undeniably powerful emotional response. By delving into the cause of this phenomenon, a deeper understanding of the role of laughter in our lives can be applied to various situations, such as building community. If humor is employed in situations where disconnection exists—school, work, etc.—the evolutionary roots embedded in our very being can transform and break down barriers.
References
Asch, S. E. (1961). Effects of group pressure upon the modification and distortion of judgments. Documents of Gestalt Psychology, 222-236. https://doi.org/10.1525/9780520313514- 017
Dunbar, R. I. (2016). The social brain hypothesis and human evolution. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190236557.013.44
Dunbar, R. I. (2022). Laughter and its role in the evolution of human social bonding. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 377(1863). https://doi.org/10.1098/rstb.2021.0176
Kramer, C. (2015). Incongruity and Seriousness. Florida Philosophical Review, 15(1), 18. https://cah.ucf.edu/fpr/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2019/11/Kramer-1.pdf
Kurtz, L. E., & Algoe, S. B. (2016). When sharing a laugh means sharing more: Testing the role of shared Laughter on short-term interpersonal consequences. Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 41(1), 45-65. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10919-016-0245-9
Manninen, S., Tuominen, L., Dunbar, R. I., Karjalainen, T., Hirvonen, J., Arponen, E., Hari, R., Jääskeläinen, I. P., Sams, M., & Nummenmaa, L. (2017). Social Laughter triggers endogenous opioid release in humans. The Journal of Neuroscience, 37(25), 6125-6131. https://doi.org/10.1523/jneurosci.0688-16.2017
Morreall, J. (2023). Philosophy of humor (Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy/Summer 2023 edition). Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Retrieved February 8, 2024, from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2023/entries/humor/
Raine, J. (2016, April 13). The evolutionary origins of Laughter are rooted more in survival than enjoyment. The Conversation. https://theconversation.com/the-evolutionary origins-of-laughter-are-rooted-more-in-survival-than-enjoyment-57750
Schopenhauer, A. (1883). The world as will and idea, TR. from the germ. by R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp (6th ed.). London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Silk, J. B. (2007). Social Components of Fitness in Primate Groups. Science 317(5843), 1347–1351. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20037749
Suttie, J. (2017, July 17). How Laughter brings us together. Greater Good. https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_laughter_brings_us_together
Warren, J. E., Sauter, D. A., Eisner, F., Wiland, J., Dresner, M. A., Wise, R. J., Rosen, S., & Scott, S. K. (2006). Positive emotions preferentially engage an auditory–motor “Mirror” system. The Journal of Neuroscience, 26(50), 13067-13075.
https://doi.org/10.1523/jneurosci.3907-06.2006
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