An interesting study for the ones who thought faking was easy! Even a smile.
A new study has revealed that people across cultures and continents are largely able to tell the difference between a fake laugh and a real one. Eye opener, isn’t it!
Researchers at the University of California have studied the nature of laughter for almost a decade and come up with some fascinating news. The studies talk in depth about the evolution of human communication and cooperation. They worked with the knowledge that laughter is a powerful and universal human play signal, that allows people to predict behaviour and affinity. The authors expanded their previous research to include new participants from different countries, across all the continents.
The model of studies was based on live laughter samples of people.
For real laughter, researchers extracted laughs from recorded conversations between pairs of English-speaking female friends. For the fake laughs, they took laughter produced by women who were asked to laugh on command. The recordings were edited for length and volume and played in random order to the study participants.
Across all the societies covered, listeners were able to distinguish a real laugh from a fake one. But some variations were also identified, later.
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Participants from smaller, less industrialized societies were more accurate in identifying fake laughs. The result suggests that in places where deep and complex social relationships are critical to survival, people are more attuned to the emotional engagement of others, and more likely to use those signals to predict other people’s behavior.
Volitional laughter and spontaneous laughter originate from different vocal production systems and have distinct acoustic features.
On the other hand, volitional laughter is produced by a system in the brain that controls the tongue and lips – our instruments of speech.
“We chose to use the words ‘real’ and ‘fake’ in our research because it taps into people’s intuition. Technically, all laughs are real — they are just produced by different vocal systems. We wanted to test whether or not this distinction is clear around the world,” said lead researcher Greg Bryant.
Humans aren’t the only animals that exhibit play vocalizations. But people are unique in using speech to mimic those spontaneous vocalizations.
On the other hand, genuine laughter is perceived as a pro-social signal, an honest expression of affiliation. But even fake laughter can be construed as a polite cooperative signal, especially in highly industrialized societies where anonymous interpersonal interactions based on social status are common.
The findings are published in the Journal of Psychological Science.