A General Field Experimental Technique for Studying Social Influence

“It’s not funny if they’re laughing”: Self-categorization, social influence, and responses to canned laughter

“…Donoghue, McCarrey, and Clément (1983) found no eVects of pre-recorded laughter on overt laughter and humor ratings among isolated participants, but pre-recorded laughter did increase overt laughter in the presence of a laughing confederate. Finally, both Vidulich and Bayley (1966) and Brown et al (1982) found increases in overt laughter in the presence of a mirthful confederate. However, no humor ratings eVect was found in the latter study (humor ratings were not collected in the former study).…”

“…One moderator that has received little theoretical or empirical attention is simply who is generating the laughter that is heard. Typically, researchers have made conformity (e.g., Brown, Dixon, & Hudson, 1982;Chapman, 1973;Fuller & Sheehy-SkeYngton, 1974;Smyth & Fuller, 1972) or social facilitation (e.g., Chapman, 1976;Chapman & Chapman, 1974;Donoghue et al, 1983) analyses of the psychological processes underlying the eVects of canned laughter, or have not considered psychological processes at all (e.g., Vidulich & Bayley, 1966). If the process is (assumed to be) automatic, for cognitive miser (Cialdini, 1993), biological (Provine, 1996), or even psychodynamic (Freud, 1905(Freud, /1960 reasons, then there is no need to consider who is generating the laughter that is heard.…”

“…A laugh was deWned as bodily movements, especially of the head and shoulders, and clearly audible sound (cf. Vidulich & Bayley, 1966). A baby monitor was placed under the participants' table (where it could not be seen) to amplify participants' audible responses and thereby facilitate the coding.…”

Thematic and collative properties of written jokes and their contribution to funniness.

“…Another problem, the apparent artificiality of these joke parameters can only be partially solved. While it may be impossible to collect unobtrusive measures of the collative properties of jokes, some field technique as Vidulich and Bayley's (1966) non-rating estimate of amusement value, or Ekman's facial affect scoring technique (cf. Ekman, Friesen, & Tomkins, 1971) could be employed to define the power of jokes to evoke the humour experience.…”

“…Maltzman, 1968). Most importantly, Vidulich and Bayley (1966) found that a sophisticated scoring method for unobtrusive measurement of the level of amusement which takes bodily movements, facial expressiveness, and verbal utterances into account, provides data correlating highly with verbal ratings of funniness on a bipolar 7-point scale.…”