Born to Be Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life

This theorizing yields deep insights into laughter. Laughter is not simply a read-out of an internal state in the body or mind, be it the cessation of anxiety and distress or uplifting rises in mirth, levity, or exhilaration. Instead, laughter is also a rich social signal that has evolved within play interactions—tickling, roughhousing, banter—to evoke cooperative responses in others. The laughter as cooperation thesis brings together scattered findings in the empirical literature. A deadlocked negotiation between Palestinian and Israeli negotiators took a dramatic turn toward common ground and compromise after they had laughed together. In my own research with executives, laughter early in negotiations—the product of breaking-the-ice banter about families, travel mishaps, hotel rooms, golf games, and the like—sets the stage for mutually beneficial bargaining. Workplace studies find that coworkers often laugh when negotiating potential conflicts—in tight spaces, at tense team meetings, when critiquing a colleague’s work. Romantic partners who manage to laugh while discussing an issue of conflict find greater satisfaction in their intimate relations. Strangers who laugh while flirting in casual conversation report greater attraction. Friends whose laughs join in antiphonal form discover greater intimacy and closeness.

And what applies to the role of laughter in Middle East negotiations and the pyrotechnics of executives haggling, colleagues coexisting, and strangers flirting speaks to the long-term trajectories of attempts at connubial peace. John Gottman has found that for couples who were divorced on average 7.4 years after they were married, negative affect—for example, contempt and anger—was especially predictive of marital demise. For couples who divorced on average 13.9 years after they were married, it was the absence of laughter that predicted the end of their bond. In the early stages of a marriage, anger and contempt are highly toxic. In the later phases of intimate relations, it is the dearth of laughter that leads individuals to part ways. Without that cooperative frame for an intimate bond that laughter provides, as well as its attendant delights, partners move on.

Perhaps laughter is the great switch of cooperation. It is a framing device, shifting social interactions to collaborative exchanges based on trust, cooperation, and goodwill. Perhaps the pulse of a marriage is to be heard in the laughter the partners share. When I awaken and I hear my two daughters giggling in the antiphonal laughter that Bachorowski discovered, I know the morning will be fine, and relatively free of the conflicts of siblings as they seek their distinct niches in life. Perhaps our relationships are only as good as our histories of laughter together.

This theorizing, though, is in need of a bit more precision. We cooperate in many ways—through gifts, soothing touch, compliments, promises, and acts of generosity. Laughter must be associated with a more specific brand of cooperation.

Counterexamples to the laughter as cooperation hypothesis readily leap to mind. Bullies routinely laugh at their aggressive acts of humiliation (just listen to the shrill nerve jangling “ha, haa” of Nelson, the bully on The Simpsons). Some torturers at Abu Ghraib were heard to laugh at their victims. Thomas Hobbes wrote that laughter is the “sudden glory” produced by “the apprehension of some deformed thing in another” that makes people “suddenly applaud themselves”—a view that does not surprise given his portrayal of a dog-eat-dog world. Clues to a more precise conceptualization of laughter are found in its origins—in how play and laughter emerge in children, and what is being achieved, socially and conceptually, in the process.

THE ABUSE OF LANGUAGE

 

The acquisition of language in young children is breathtaking. Children learn ten or so words a day until the age of six, when the average child has a command of over 13,000 words. Children produce grammatically complex phrases even when not given such input from their parents, for example when parents speak pidgin. It is for these reasons that Steve Pinker called this high-wattage capacity the language instinct.

Just as remarkable, though, is how quickly children begin to abuse the rules of language. In particular, there is striking developmental regularity in the tendency for children, early in life, to violate basic rules of representation. They quickly start producing utterances that violate notions that words are supposed to refer to specific objects, and objects are to be characterized by specific words. And it is in this representational abuse that we find the core meaning of laughter—laughter indicates that alternatives to reality are possible, it is an invitation to enter into the world of pretense, it is a suspension of the demands of literal meaning and more formal social exchange. Laughter is a ticket to travel to the landscape of the human imagination.