You can tell WHAT about a person just from their laugh?

New studies show that just one second of your laughter is enough to know your status

According to new research by the University of California San Diego, laughter can give some insight into the social status of a person.

In the study, 48 male members of a university fraternity were placed into low-status (pledges, having recently joined the fraternity) and high-status (fraternity members active for two years or more) groups. The men were recorded telling jokes to each other.

They found that the low-status groups had constrained, submissive laughs, compared with their high-status fraternity brothers who displayed dominant, louder laughter.

“I think this is about the psychology of power, and status tends to co-occur with power,” assistant professor Christopher Ovesis said. “We give off a lot of information about ourselves in the way we behave, and we’re constantly trying to detect these signals from people even on an unconscious level.”

Johannah Burton

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