Of Laughter and Dominance

How An Unencumbered Guffaw Might Help You Climb the Social Ladder

We humans crave social status. We fight for money, promotions, fancy titles—anything for social prestige. We’re like a tamed version of the vicious macaque monkey: constantly clawing for a better spot in the hierarchy.

This ascension up the social ladder isn’t always easy. It often involves the acquisition of expertise, good looks, and other qualities that take either hard work or fortuitous circumstance to obtain. But can laughter be another way in which to make this climb?

The latter question is derived from a relatively recent finding in the social psychological literature. What the research suggests is that different levels on this hierarchy have corresponding styles of laughter. Those on the bottom have a more “submissive” style (as it’s disparagingly called) while those on the top have a style more dominant. It could be possible, then, to traverse these social boundaries with a mere change in your laughter.

One study in particular that helped address this question was conducted in 2016 by Christopher Oveis—an assistant professor at UCSD’s Rady School of Management. What he found was that if you take a group of low-status fraternity members, embolden them with confidence, and get them laughing in a more dominant way, the so-called “naive observer” might perceive them as more dominant.

The question then becomes this: Can you laugh yourself into a higher position on the hierarchy? The answer, as you might have guessed, is maybe.

To understand this potential paradox, we need to understand Oveis’s experiment. Roughly, it has two parts. First, he set out to establish that people on opposite ends of the social spectrum do in fact have different laughs. Second, he wanted to see whether these laughs, if played with a discrepant personality (i.e., a dominant person with a submissive laugh or a submissive person with a dominant laugh), can alter how others perceive you.

To answer the first question, Oveis recruited two different kinds of fraternity member: “pledges,” who’d been in a frat for fewer than two months, and “seniors” — as I’ll call them — who’d been there for two years or more.

These two types of fraternity member were meant to illustrate polar ends of the social hierarchy. Pledges in the fraternity world are typically at the bottom of the barrel; they’re the ones subjected to all those unsavory hazing rituals. Once you make it past these, you earn the status of an official member. This makes sense: Two years in a fraternity is easily comparable to a handful of years in soviet Russia. Survivors are impressive.

With dominant and submissive status defined, Oveis could then see how, if at all, laughter differed between these two groups. So, to get them laughing, he gave them the timeless task of insulting one another.

When we’re joking with friends, enemies, and the like, we tend to joke aggressively. We insult each other, make false threats, and peddle other camaraderie in an attempt to jest. To ensure that our lovely compatriots know we mean these acts purely as play, we laugh, smile, and ingratiate. As Oveis elaborates: We like to laugh “before, during, and after the act of verbal aggression.” This caution enables us to joke with impunity.

To distinguish one group’s laughter from the other, Oveis recorded the interactions between the pledges and seniors and subsequently had them coded. The coders were asked to rate the laughter’s pitch, pitch range, and intensity (or loudness) on a continuum along with a few other factors. The prediction was that the dominant members in the frat would laugh with more intensity and variability in pitch, while the submissive pledges would show the opposite.

This hypothesis is derived from the fact that social dominance tends to correlate with disinhibition. What this means is that those on the top of the hierarchy are less likely to stifle their feelings and behavior with second-guessing. They’re like brazen drunks with a penchant for talking too much (and too loudly). This disinhibition is expected to manifest in their laughter.

The results of the analysis showed, as predicted, that the laugh of these two groups differed. And, also in line with predictions, that those on the bottom of the hierarchy had a more stifled laugh—weaker in intensity and less variable in pitch—while those on the top had louder laughs with more pitch variability. It was the difference between the timid and the cacklers.

Now that Oveis established the laughter of these two groups as distinct, he could alter the way in which they were presented to naive observers. Since both pledges and seniors at one point or another gave dominant and submissive forms of laughter, Oveis could now play a pledge laughing dominantly or a senior laughing submissively. The result could be a change in perceived status. And this is exactly what he found.

When the naive observers heard the lowly pledges laughing dominantly, they assumed they were more dominant. When questioned, they predicted that the laughing pledges had more influence, power, and respect than they did in fact have. Oddly, the converse was not found: When high-status seniors laughed submissively, they did not suffer a blow in perceived dominance.

The reasoning behind this possible hiccup in the data is that status on the top of the hierarchy is somewhat inflexible. Once you have it, your behaviors stay constant. So while the senior fraternity members might be laughing more submissively, they’re still laughing like the elite fraternity brother they are—with stability and bravado.

But the interesting find here isn’t the stability of high-status senior guffaws, but rather the increased status of the lowly pledges. We can now reapproach our initial question: Can we climb the social ladder with a particular laugh?

The answer is only partially yes. While it’s true that a certain type of laughter—loud, bold, and variable in pitch—can get you perceived as more dominant, we can’t all go around trying to control our laughter. What kind of world would that be? Instead, you should probably embrace your laughter, whatever its form. This is likely a better path to dominance than feeling uncomfortable with who you are.