PLoS ONE· 2021Q1
Laughter influences social bonding but not prosocial generosity to friends and strangers
- 23citations
- Q1SCImago
- 2021year
Short summary
Laughter triggers endorphin release, enhancing social bonding, but does not increase prosocial generosity to friends or strangers, suggesting separate mechanisms for bonding and prosociality.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Key points
- Laughter triggers endorphin release, indicated by a higher pain threshold.
- Increased endorphin levels correlate with enhanced social bonding.
- Laughter did not significantly affect prosocial generosity in the Dictator Game.
- Social bonding and prosociality may operate via different mechanisms or serve different functions.
AI-generated from the title and abstract; the full text is not read.
Abstract
Humans deploy a number of specific behaviours for forming social bonds, one of which is laughter. However, two questions have not yet been investigated with respect to laughter: (1) Does laughter increase the sense of bonding to those with whom we laugh? and (2) Does laughter facilitate prosocial generosity? Using changes in pain threshold as a proxy for endorphin upregulation in the brain and a standard economic game (the Dictator Game) as an assay of prosociality, we show that laughter does trigger the endorphin system and, through that, seems to enhance social bonding, but it does not reliably influence donations to others. This suggests that social bonding and prosociality may operate via different mechanisms, or on different time scales, and relate to different functional objectives.
The authors' abstract, as published at the source. PLoS ONE, 2021 · DOI ↗
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Field: Social Psychology
Social PsychologyPsychology