“If someone else is hurt, laughter doesn’t look confident anymore—it actually looks insensitive, because it signals disregard,” Sezer says. “The key thing is to match your reaction to the seriousness of the moment.”
When someone is harmed, she adds, observers shift from evaluating likability to evaluating morality. In those situations, people expect visible signs of remorse. In the study’s final experiment, participants judged someone who laughed after injuring a colleague as significantly less competent and less moral than someone who showed embarrassment instead. Humor, in that context, wasn’t seen as self-assured—rather, it signaled that the person didn’t fully appreciate the consequences of their actions.
At the heart of it, Sezer says, is emotional calibration: “It’s this emotional awareness of the situation that you signal to others.”
Training yourself to laugh instead of blush
If you’re the type to light up like a fire engine when you say something awkward or get someone’s name wrong, that reaction can feel automatic. Yet there are ways to interrupt it and pivot toward humor instead.
Discussion about this post