“It’s a genuine signal that you send when you’re in a relaxed and comfortable situation,” Addyman says. But while you can’t groom a bunch of people at the same time, you can share laughter - and the pleasant feelings that come with it - with many individuals at once. “Grooming was a one-on-one, unfakeable investment of time in somebody else,” explains Addyman, and it created trust among group members as well as a sense of community. While he is still teasing out why children needed to signal their enjoyment of the cartoon to whoever was there, he thinks it has to do with the idea, raised by Oxford University anthropologist and primatologist Robin Dunbar, that laughter could be a replacement for the earlier primate behavior of grooming. Evolutionary biology suggests it’s a way for humans to share with other humans - and thus, to belong.
The need to communicate with laughter may have deep roots in our development as a species, speculates Addyman.
“The main reason they’re laughing is to communicate that they find this funny.” For example, when preschoolers watched the cartoon alone, they sometimes looked around and tried to catch the researcher’s eye during funny moments. This suggested to him that laughter is more than a contagious reaction instead, it’s “a signal to someone else that’s there,” he says. But interestingly, the children didn’t laugh any more in a big group than they laughed with just one other person. Children laughed eight times as much when they were with another child than when they watched the cartoon on their own - even though they reported that the cartoon was just as funny in both situations.Īddyman had expected that a child’s laughter would increase with company. For the experiment, Addyman observed how children aged between 2-and-a-half years old and 4 years old reacted to a funny cartoon when they watched it alone, with one other child, and in a group. This became clear in a lab study of laughter with preschoolers. Because while young babies may think the other person actually disappears when they hide behind their hands and get shocked into giggles when the hider reappears, older babies, such as two-year-olds, aren’t fooled - and yet they still find it absolutely hilarious.Ī key ingredient that fuels early laughter: Sharing. He didn’t think its power was just its ability to surprise. The hands-down winner, even across different countries, was … peekaboo. Contenders for most hilarious game included such heavyweights as making silly noises or playing with puppets. There is one game that babies all around the world find a laugh riot. Addyman was reassured to have them confirm their children began to chuckle at three months. From September 2012 to November 2013, they sent in answers to his questions: When did their babies first laugh? What situations do they find the funniest? What toys and games made them laugh the most? About 1,500 mothers and fathers from 62 countries across the globe - including the Philippines, Zambia, Uruguay and Australia - responded and some sent in short videos. He wondered if laughter could be “a new way into seeing what babies were thinking about.”Īs a first step into this field, Addyman collected parents’ observations of their babies’ laughter (in his research, he classifies babies as children up to 30 months, or two-and-a-half years old). Addyman, who doesn’t have children of his own, was inspired by this fact and by watching his sister joking and laughing with her baby daughter. While babies typically say their first words when they’re between 9 and 12 months old, studies have found they begin laughing much earlier - at just 3 months. He wanted to study how babies learn, but, unlike a scientist working with adult subjects, “You can’t ask babies questions or get them to press buttons,” he says. This is what first interested Addyman, a lecturer in developmental psychology at Goldsmiths, University of London and director of the Goldsmiths InfantLab. That’s according to British researcher Caspar Addyman, who spends his days investigating this wonderful question: What makes babies and young children laugh?īabies laugh before they talk, which makes laughter one of the earliest clues as to how we humans experience the world. In fact, the essential ingredient is both simpler and more profound. As it turns out, provoking their giggles has little to do with splashy toys or silly jokes. There are few sweeter sounds in this world than a baby’s laugh. IStock Babies start laughing before they can speak, and this delicious sound just may serve as a powerful source of human communication and connection, says psychology researcher Caspar Addyman.