Making people laugh the trick to make them like you
Laughter is the best way to break the ice and get someone to open up to you, according to researchers in London who say sharing a giggle makes people more willing to share more, even if they aren’t aware they’re doing so.
Opening up to someone verbally is a sure sign they’ve become comfortable with you and a critical building block in forming a new friendship.
Yet, it can be difficult to get to that point because self-disclosure is often highly sensitive, and the study aimed to find out more about the role of laughter in developing relationships.
Working with 112 students from Oxford University, they divided them into groups of four, and made sure nobody knew each other.
Participants were asked to watch a 10-minute video without speaking to one another.
The groups were given different videos, eliciting a range of emotions.
For example, one featured a stand-up comedy by Michael McIntyre, another was a golf instruction video and a third was a feel-good nature clip from the Jungles episode of the British Broadcasting Channel (BBC) Planet Earth series.
The research team measured the levels of laughter and the participants’ emotional states were assessed after they watched.
Next, each member in each four-person group was asked to write a message to a fellow group-mate to help them get to know each other better.
Those who had shared a good laugh revealed considerably more intimate information than the groups that watched the serious stuff, according to the study, which was published in the journal Human Nature.
There’s more to it than simply having shared a positive experience: lead author Alan Gray of University College London says self-disclosure is part of the physiological process that follows a good laugh.
Laughter triggers the release of endorphin, also known as the “happy hormone,” he says, which soothes the system and coaxes people into revealing intimate details to strangers.
Despite being enrolled at one of the most prestigious institutions in the world, the Oxford students were often unaware that they were making an intimate disclosure, says Gray, yet the listener always realised it.
“This seems to be in line with the notion that laughter is linked specifically to fostering behaviours that encourage relationship development, since observer ratings of disclosure may be more important for relationship development than how much one feels one is disclosing,” says Gray.
Laughter, he says, should be of interest to anyone interested in how social relationships evolve.
