The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos - Make 'Em Laugh

Episode Date: November 15, 2019

The world's greatest expert on canned TV laugh tracks helps Dr Laurie Santos demonstrate how the emotions of those around us can make us feel happier or more sad. If happiness is so contagious... can we do more to bring joy to ourselves and our loved ones?For an even deeper dive into the research we talk about in the show visit happinesslab.fm Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Pushkin. The sounds of laughter. There are people who study it. People like Ben Glenn. This extended sequence of laughs from the Jack Benny program is one of the all-time greats. Jack Benny was the biggest comedian of his day. His show ran on radio and TV for more than 30 years. It's said that The Jack Benny Show

was the only program President John F. Kennedy would watch religiously. His jokes have probably generated more laughs than anyone in the history of comedy. In this scene, comedian Johnny Carson has just remarked that he has no idea how Jack Benny stays so young. The gag that's slaying the audience is the reveal that Jack stays young because

he's a robot, and his staff are dismantling him bit by bit, putting him in storage for the night. But the laughter you're hearing from this gag isn't pure. It's sweetened. Sweetening is augmenting the authentic reactions

of a sitting audience with pre-recorded reactions. Augmenting authentic reactions. That's the media industry trick you might know as canned laughter or a laugh track. The man I'm talking to, Ben Glenn, is a television historian and an expert on the history of this technique. He's listened to every faked shriek

and spliced in guffaw in US TV history. I'm 54 years old. I am the television generation. And I thought to myself, why does nobody ever talk about this? Because the laugh track was a critical, integral part of these shows and of their success. Canned laughter is pretty common today, but I was surprised to hear the secret history of how this technique developed. The laugh track began in earnest in 1950 when an engineer named Charles Douglas, a sound engineer at CBS, developed not only the idea that you could insert pre-recorded laughter, but he also built and designed himself in his garage, the apparatus

to use tape loops of carefully selected reactions that could be inserted into television shows. And so where did he get those? In the original, where did those reactions come from? Boy, that is the question that everybody asks. So I took it upon myself to start digging. The facts are very hard to uncover because it was meant to be a well-kept Hollywood secret. Ben's oral detective work led him to listen over and over, both to classic laugh tracks and early television comedies. In the end, he was able to figure out that Douglas made his laugh tracks by recording the real studio audiences who watched early comedians,

like Red Skelton, Lucille Ball, and Abedin Costello. There's also a report that some of the earliest ones in the 1950s came from a Marcel Marceau performance in Los Angeles. And of course, that would make sense since he was a mime and there was no interfering music or any sort of distraction noise, etc. Ben told me something that totally blew my mind. Those early laugh tracks are still in use today. The exact same guffaws and shrieks that people heard in the 50s

are still sweetening modern TV shows. We are hearing reactions that were recorded decades ago. They're dead people. Yes, but they live on. Television comedies are still using these laughs because they work. As I listened to Ben's clips of early comedies, I realized that the canned laughter

does seem to make jokes funnier, even if the gags are pretty dumb, which, honestly, many of the gags were. But why was my brain reacting like this? How can the pre-recorded laughter of dead people I've never met affect my experience of a mostly-not-funny television show today? I mean, are we literally catching other people's emotions, like the common cold? And if we are, how can we inoculate ourselves against the sorts of feelings we might not want to catch from other people? Our minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy.

But what if our minds are wrong? What if our minds are lying to us, leading us away from what will really make us happy? The good news is that understanding the science of the mind can point us all back in the right direction. You're listening to The Happiness Lab with Dr. Laurie Santos. Modern-day laugh tracks are only a few decades old, but comedy designers have been using similar techniques for centuries. If you think about it, in the 16th century,

Shakespearean plays, they were performed in front of an extremely raucous audience, where the audience cheered the protagonist and booed the villain. There are actually accounts of Shakespeare planted people in the audience to react in a certain way to spur on the audience members around. Shakespeare wasn't alone. There's a long, long history of seeding live audiences like this. The opera houses of France employed whole groups of claqueurs, hired guns who sat in the auditorium, primed to lead the paying audience in whatever reaction the script required. Some members of the claque even had specializations. Rearers were expert laughers, while pleurers could summon tears at will.

Early television producers also realized the power of these techniques. Early television producers also realized the power of these techniques. They would have loved to hire professional clackers to enhance their studio audience's reaction, but they couldn't afford something that extravagant. Charles Douglas' new advance in laughter technology offered a tantalizing, albeit totally fabricated, alternative. The entire process was, it was artificial from beginning to end. In a few years, Douglas was able to raise his laugh track from simple canned laughter to an art form. He wasn't just lifting laughs.

It was as though he was a conductor and the laughing audience members were his orchestra. He would sit up late at night in his living room and he would be listening to tape loops and splicing and extracting reactions. He engineered them to bring a certain individual laugh to the surface and to suppress ambient laughter. They often were sped up to make it seem even more kind of jolly or, you know, more intensely funny.

The machine he built held up to 320 reactions. Douglas' new machine allowed him to become the master of television emotional manipulation. But most shows couldn't afford his exquisite new craft. Charles Douglas charged about $100 per day. If that was over budget for some production companies, they found some, I have to say, sort of low budget pre-existing laugh track. For example, The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet, which was an enormously popular show in its day, used only one reaction, regardless of situation. So it was like the same laugh every single time.

The same laugh. The exact same laugh. But shows soon recognized they needed to be a little bit more professional with their sweetening to make the joke stick, which put Douglas' laugh track in even more demand. And that's when Douglas realized he could start sweetening more than just the laughs. What we see is that the laugh track expands beyond just laughter. And these are some of my favorite reactions. There is shock.

There are, you know, women kind of squealing. Oh! Oh! Oh! So the laugh track expanded beyond just laughter to include the full range of how an audience might react. But why was Douglas' technique so powerful? Why does hearing the squeals of people we've never met change our own reaction to a television show? Well, if you've listened to some of the previous episodes, you know that experiencing an event, say eating a piece of chocolate at the same time as another person, can make those events more intense. But psychology shows that experiencing an event with another person can also change our experience of that event in other ways as well.

Our thinking and our reactions and really the psychology of what we're watching can be changed by the reactions around us. Psychologists have long documented the fact that we tend to copy other people's behavior, unconsciously and most of the time without even realizing it. In one study by Tanya Chartrand and colleagues, subjects were brought into the lab and told they needed to work with another person to describe a set of magazine photos. But the photos were not part of the experiment. Unbeknownst to the subject, the people chosen as their partners were actually experimental clackers, or confederates, as scientists called them. They were people hired by the experimenters to behave in a very specific way.

They rubbed their face a bunch, or sometimes touched their feet over and over. Chartrand and colleagues wanted to know how these behaviors affected the subjects. It turns out, being around someone touching their face caused the research subjects to touch their own faces more often, whereas being around someone who touched their feet caused participants to touch their feet more often, even though both of these behaviors are really weird. This result and lots of others show that we tend to unconsciously mimic the behavior of others, a phenomenon that researchers christened the chameleon effect. We're literally catching other people's behavior. But we don't just catch

other people's behavior. Researchers have long realized that there's a tight link between behaving in a certain way and feeling a certain way. The act of behaving in a certain way, say smiling or frowning, can influence how we feel. Research has shown that adopting a happy facial expression can unconsciously improve our mood. There are also studies showing that when you can't make facial expressions, it becomes harder to experience emotions. Chartrand showed this in an unusual experiment. She tested whether women who receive Botox injections, which paralyzes facial muscles, have trouble recognizing emotions in others. She found that not being able to make a particular facial expression

makes it harder to recognize that emotion in others. What does all this have to do with the laugh track? Well, if audience members naturally copy the reactions of those around them, then they'll not only behave differently when they hear a laugh track, chuckling a bit more, but they'll also feel differently. Because of emotional contagion, we're literally catching other people's emotions. Hearing other people laugh at a joke makes us think that the joke is actually funnier. It's reassuring, like, oh yes, I'm not the only one who finds that funny. That validates me. That is funny. Humans are not just behavioral chameleons, but emotional chameleons as well.

We're as susceptible to the emotions around us as we are to a highly contagious disease. But we don't often like to think that our emotions can be so fickle, which meant that despite its pervasiveness, not everyone was a fan of Douglas' laugh track technology. I think the term canned laughter was pejorative and was used by critics and probably producers and writers who looked down upon the use of pre-recorded reactions. But laugh tracks persist because they really do work. They make a show seem funnier, whether or not we like to admit it. That becomes clear when you listen to shows that forego a little sweetening. Some networks tried to embark upon what they called a prestige sitcom, which had no laugh track at all. One called Frank's Place on CBS. There was one called The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd. And they wore this as a badge of honor, like, we need no laugh track. They went nowhere. They fizzled. And who remembers them, right?

When I teach my class at Yale, I show students a modern-day TV show without its clackers, just to make the very same point. Ah, nothing makes beer taste better than cool, clear Rocky Mountain spring water. So Big Bang Theory on YouTube, somebody's gone in and clipped out the laugh track, and it sounds super weird.

We're at the Rocky Mountains anyway. Philadelphia. It's not a joke. Like, they're not jokes. They're not jokes, but they just fill it with this to sort of propel you into thinking everything is funny. How we hear other people reacting is contagious. Laugh tracks are one of the most common cases of emotional contagion in action. Whether or not we want to admit it, we do enjoy TV shows more when there's canned laughter.

But emotional contagion can also be used in more insidious ways, because not everyone out there wants to make us laugh. Some companies today make money not by making us feel good, but by making us feel a whole lot worse. The Happiness Lab will be right back. Ugh, we're so done with new year, new you this year. It's more you on Bumble.

More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini is because you know, you always like them more of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too.

Be more you this year and find them on Bumble. I opened up my email and there were hundreds of emails that were all mostly like, how dare you do this? And you're so unethical or other friends writing me saying, hey, you better get a lawyer and I hope you're okay. This is my friend Jeff Hancock. Back in 2014, Jeff opened up a firestorm of hate in his inbox. And over the course of the next five or six days, you know, I could literally tell where the sun was up around the world by where I was receiving hate mail from. I distinctly remember watching all this happen,

just the crazy level of outrage that Jeff had elicited. I was worried about him. Many of our colleagues were too. What had Jeff done to generate so much fury from complete strangers? He ran an experiment to manipulate people's emotions online, and they didn't like it. I often remember the first time I read about emotional contagion and the metaphor that the author used was you could cut the emotions in the room with a knife. And I know that feeling. You walk into a room and you can be like, oh, it's tense in here. Most psychologists study emotional contagion in the context of real-world social interactions like these. But Jeff wanted to know whether we could catch people's emotions in more subtle ways as well, like through a relatively new form of human communication, writing.

So until the 1940s, over half of the planet's population was illiterate, so they never left any record of any of their communication. And now, you know, if you were to ask one of your podcast listeners if they'd written something today, almost everybody would say yes. We forget that text is a completely new form of communication for our species. And for a long time, most scientists simply assumed that emotions couldn't transmit as easily through written word as they did face-to-face. I really hated this sort of idea that you can't communicate emotions in text like in emails and things like that. can't communicate emotions in text like in emails and things like that.

Jeff's research showed that participants pick up other people's emotions through text in, say, a quick email note or an online comment just as easily as they do in face-to-face real-world interactions. On the one hand, it's surprising, like, wow, how can you tell emotions in text? And then you think about your favorite author, and of course you have these super powerful feelings from text. I remember reading Game of Thrones and there's this red wedding event where people that you aren't expecting to be killed get killed. And I was so furious I had to stop reading and go for a walk. And it was just one of these examples of like, yeah, why do we think that you can't communicate

emotion through text or online? But there are a number of reasons why the text we read online is a different communication medium than the quick emotions we experience around other people. The first difference is longevity. When I laugh at a funny joke, you only hear that signal for a few seconds. But text, especially the text we post online, is really different. It's true that up until very recently in human history, everything we said and did disappeared. And now we leave records. The records people leave can continue affecting our emotions for years and years to come.

My favorite writer, Kurt Vonnegut, has been dead for years. But his quotes still make me laugh and sometimes cringe. But there's a second way that text, especially text on the internet, is different. We don't have as much control over who is affecting our emotions. We evolved to be around a small number of people, which means that most face-to-face emotional contagion only occurs between people who know each other well. But on the internet, we're emotionally affected both by people we're close to and by people we never even meet in real life. I should have a contagious sort of feeling if my mom posts something that's upsetting for her.

I should feel some empathy and negative response. But if I'm looking through the comments of a hockey game that took place last night and I'm reading the comments, somebody named poster number 83 is upset or angry. That should have zero bearing on my emotional situation. And yet, because of some of the automatic aspects of the way we respond to others' emotions, it can trigger things in me. When we're on the internet, we don't only succumb to the emotions of people like our family members, people we know and care about. Then there's these sort of like unknown people that I never expect to meet again. I don't have any idea who they actually are. And we can call that the unknown network. And this could be some Russian agent, it could be some fraud

strata Nigeria. And typically in the face-to-face world, it's really easy to keep those two kinds of contacts separate. So those two networks aren't overlapping. But on the internet and something like a Facebook news feed, those two worlds are completely overlaid and they sit right on top of each other. It's just as easy for a Russian agent to put something in my feed or my advertising space as it is for Lori. And this means that our emotions aren't just affected by the people that matter. We're also, in theory, catching the emotions of third cousins we haven't seen in years, random strangers, advertisers, bots, really anything that winds up in our newsfeed.

Everybody's newsfeed is super huge, it turns out. Because of network effects, if you have, say, 300 friends on Facebook, you'll have thousands of possible pieces of content to look at in your newsfeed. And what Facebook very quickly found out was that much of that people found uninteresting and unengaging. And so they developed algorithms to try and predict what the say 20 to 30 most interesting pieces for a person might be basically what happens is a piece of content would come and the algorithm would rank it and say well jeff would be really interested in this we're going to put at the top of his feed or he wouldn't at all we're going to put it down you know in his 1500th and so everybody's news

feed is algorithmically curated and now in in 2019, most people know this. And I think in 2014, this was not well known and I think was a big part of the outrage. Ah yes, the outrage. So why did everyone get so mad at Jeff? Well, Facebook was interested to see if its users were experiencing emotional contagion from the posts they read. In particular, they were worried about some studies that were coming out suggesting that people might feel bad when they look at their news feed. It would be very bad for a lot of obvious reasons if one of their main key products was causing their users to be depressed or causing negative emotion. The social media giant designed an experiment to figure out the emotional impact of Facebook posts. Unbeknownst to the subjects, it decided to tweak the newsfeed algorithm for two different test groups of users.

The first group, the negative content group, was picked to see less bad content in their newsfeed. It never went away. It was always in your feed, just, you know, you'd be less likely to see it. But there was another group or condition who saw their newsfeed altered in the other emotional direction. So if you were in the positive emotion condition, you know, even more controversial condition than when posts had positive emotion in them, they'd be moved down in your feed and you'd be less likely to see them. How did this change to a person's feed affect the emotions that they themselves expressed in

their own posts? Were users automatically catching the emotions they saw in their feeds? That's what we found. And so if you were in the fewer positive posts condition, then you would write about four positive words fewer over the next thousand words that you post on Facebook. Jeff and his colleagues had shown that people do catch the emotions they see in their feed. It was an important result. People online, many that you've never even met, were able to make you feel happier or sadder in your real offline life. He got a little bit of media attention. I remember Jimmy Fallon actually cracked a joke about it in one of his monologues. I remember being like, okay, right on. Jimmy Fallon cracks

joke. That's a checkmark. Great. And after that thought like, okay, I guess that'll be sort of it for the study. Jeff couldn't have been more wrong. The hate mail started arriving and not just for weeks after his study, but for years. How dare you manipulate my news feed? And the public anger he stirred didn't just hurt him. My wife was really negatively affected emotionally. I mean, she would turn on the radio, the TV, or fire up her email or go on Twitter,

and we'd just be seeing all these takedowns of her husband being an unethical monster and you forget that like your work isn't just you but it's also all the people around you that have supported it. Jeff's study raised questions that had never before been asked about the role of social media in our emotional lives. I think for a long time people kind of viewed those as two different worlds there's like stuff that happens on social media or online and it's like whatever. And then there's the real world. People really recognized all of a sudden that like, hey, these are both real worlds. And what you read and the emotions you get from learning about your social network, they don't drop off once you turn the screen off. They actually stay with you and they can influence your physical interactions. One thing has changed for Jeff though.

His study has changed the kinds of emotional things he posts online. I certainly try to be a positive person whenever I'm using any sort of form of technology. I'm very aware of the possible effects of writing negative things. Jeff's onto something here, something we'll explore in more detail after the break. When we first hear about the Facebook study, we can feel existentially threatened. From laugh tracks to biased news feeds, it can seem like other people are constantly affecting us, and as though our emotions are completely out of our control, even subject to manipulation. But when you start to understand how these techniques

work, when you begin realizing that these forces are being used against you, you can react in a more positive way to all of this emotional contagion. Because just as we are affected by the emotions of others, so too do our emotions affect other people. And that means that we can have a lot more control over our own emotional climate than we often think. We can become the laugh track we want to hear in the world. The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment. Ugh, we're so done with new year, new you. This year, it's more you on Bumble.

More of you shamelessly sending playlists, especially that one filled with show tunes. More of you finding Gemini's because you know you always like them. More of you dating with intention because you know what you want. And you know what? We love that for you. Someone else will too. Be more you this year

and find them on Bumble. When my youngest child was very, very young, probably about four or so, and I was reprimanding her for something, not particularly aggressively, but just reprimanding,

she said to me, you are making me have negative emotional contagion. And I'm kind of like, well, that's sort of the point, actually. This is Seagal Barsade. She's a professor at the Wharton School of Business. Seagal is an expert on emotional contagion, and specifically, how we can use this phenomenon to make ourselves and our organizations a little bit happier. The reason I started to study emotional contagion was because I was in a workplace and there was a woman in the workplace who worked there, we'll call her Megan. And I didn't report to her. I didn't actually need to even work with her a lot, but she was a very negative person. need to even work with her a lot, but she was a very negative person. And one day she left for vacation. And I noticed that there was a palpable difference in the workplace among everybody who

was in this open office. People's shoulders almost like seemed to lower and they were more relaxed and happy. Then when she came back from vacation, everything went back to what it was. And I remember thinking, wow, this person is having this tremendous effect on our mood, even when we don't literally have to engage with her around workplace issues. Seagal has explored how moods transmit through an organization, how emotional contagion can shape an entire group or even an entire workplace culture. You can imagine a work group where, you know, somebody comes in in a really great mood. Everybody else is, let's say, kind of neutral. That somebody comes in in a really great mood, everybody else is, let's say, kind of neutral, that person comes in, they're bubbly, they're warm, and that infects everybody else. Or you can also imagine the opposite, which is somebody comes in, they're in

a really bad mood, and everybody was kind of fine, but now they're feeling it, most often it's coming as a very automatic process as a result of behavioral mimicry, mimicking the facial expressions and body language, and then through a variety of physiological processes we're actually feeling those emotions. The process Seagal describes is pretty intuitive. It's probably obvious that people can affect others' moods in the workplace. But as an organizational theorist, I was also interested in, intuitive. It's probably obvious that people can affect others' moods in the workplace. But as an organizational theorist, I was also interested in, okay, if this happens, does it matter? You know, does it influence anything behaviorally? Seagal tested whether the contagion led to bad workplace outcomes. She had her workers do a bunch of financial decision tasks,

including making hard decisions about monetary allocations. Did workers make worse decisions when in the presence of a single bad-mooted confederate? What we found is that in the positive emotional contagion conditions, the groups were less conflictual, more cooperative, and they literally allocated the money differently, the pot of money. They were more collectivistic in how they did it. This was very powerful evidence for the idea that A, yes, emotions are contagious, and B, that they actually influence work outcomes. Seagal's study has now been replicated in a number of experimental and field settings, from cricket teams to bank branches to coffee shops. Much like the flu, a single bad mood can transmit fast. It can influence

the performance of an entire team. It can even affect the way frontline workers interact with their customers. One of the most insidious parts of workplace contagion is the fact that the process is reciprocal. One negative feeling Megan in the office doesn't just make the folks around her grumpy. Those folks then become their own influences, making everyone more annoyed and more stressed, and on and on and on. This sort of emotional feedback loop is what Siegel refers to as an affective spiral. We literally do spiral and we can have upward spirals and we can have downward spirals. The problem is that we often forget such spirals are as common as they really are. Time and time again in research studies, it's shown that people don't actually

know it's occurring. And in some ways, what I find so exciting about being able to talk to this to people is that by letting them know that it is a phenomenon that is happening, then you're much more aware of it if you want to protect yourself against the emotional contagion. Because we all have our Megans in the office, you know, for better or for worse. Yes, exactly. Well, and you know what? We're all Megans in some ways. And what I mean by that is that, you know, we have moods, right? We all vary and quite dramatically throughout the day, throughout the week. And so being really conscious of that can help us understand how we're affecting other people. people. Seagal's onto something really important here. If we don't work on our own emotions, we can inadvertently start a downward spiral ourselves. Our negativity will likely get caught by others around us, which can then get transmitted back to us. We can inadvertently be the first bad

step in a causal chain that leads us to experience more misery. Luckily, Seagal's research has shown lots of ways that we can alter our expressions to smooth out otherwise negative emotional situations, both at work and beyond. Let's say you're in a job interview with somebody and you see that they're very nervous. You know, one of the worst things you can say to somebody is, you know, calm down, right? If you sort of slow your pace a little bit, you look encouragingly, you change your tone, as you can probably hear in what I'm doing right now, that will naturally calm that person down so that you can get kind of a more clear interview. As a leader, you know, if you have people panicking around you, for example. Model for them the emotions that are going to be the

most productive in that situation. If you're sophisticated about understanding that, you have this other way of getting your team on board and where they need to be. Seagal has focused a lot of her research on the one member of a team that has the most powerful role in a team's emotions, the boss. When I hear about a group or an organization that has really low morale, one of the first questions I'm asking is, how's the leader coming in in the morning? You know, is the leader coming in excited, enthusiastic, energetic, talking with people, or is the leader coming in looking like they have the weight of the world on their shoulders and really stressed? People are always paying attention to leaders, and so they literally catch the leader's mood. Seagal is currently working on a number of

training programs to get leaders to regulate their feelings, both internally and externally, in ways that best help the group. But the first step is simply realizing that one's emotions can affect a team's mood and its performance. Knowledge is empowering. Things like you're doing now with this episode allow people to know that this exists and it's empowering because there are things that you can do to try to not catch somebody else's emotions. The other empowering piece of this, though, is knowing that we can change each other's moods. The good news is that Seagal's work suggests that we can be the emotional change we want to see in the world. I asked her if this work has made her

hopeful, if she thinks we really can tackle all the negative office megans in our lives. Absolutely, the affective spiral can begin with us. Absolutely. So what have we learned in this episode? First, we are affected by other people's emotions way, way more than we realize. We unconsciously and automatically catch the grief, despair, excitement, rage, joy, sadness, and serenity of all the individuals we encounter. Whether that person is a close friend at a party, the guy behind us in line at a coffee

shop, some ranting idiot on Reddit, or even the voice of some long-dead 50s man laughing hysterically on a bad sitcom. By instinctually copying others' behaviors, we irresistibly take on what they feel, whether we like that feeling or not. But we've also learned that we have more agency than we think. We can be more aware of how the people we interact with online are affecting us, and mindful of what we ourselves post. We can have control over whether we're the office Megan, or that burst of calm in a tough moment, or the laugh that everyone really, really needs. And that means that listening to this podcast and following its advice won't just

help your happiness. Making changes in your own life can be the positive seed that transforms the well-being of those around you. So if you'd like to be a force for good, to help make joy just a little bit more viral, I hope you'll return for the next episode of The Happiness Lab with me, Dr. Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co-written and produced by Ryan Dilley. The show is mixed and mastered by Evan Viola and edited by Julia Barton. Fact-checking by Joseph Fridman. And our original music was composed by Zachary Silver.

Special thanks to Mia LaBelle, Carly Migliori, Heather Fane, Maggie Taylor, Maya Koenig, and Jacob Weisberg. The Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and me, Dr. Laurie Santos.