Laughing Up

Have you ever been in a meeting with your boss and other strangers and caught yourself being the only one laughing at her witty comments? Think again.

The universal expression of laughter (that we share with our closest animal relatives) is - among other things - a social tactic to acknowledge and manage hierarchy. We laugh at the jokes of those above us in the hierarchy and initiate derisive laughter against those we wish to exclude.

How would this work in highly hierarchical cultures (i.e. with a higher power distance index score)? Would managers in these cultures (as a consequence of the above) be more likely to have a distorted view of how funny they are? After all they must get an otherwise unexplicably large supply of confirming laughter from their subordinates.

Also, would these leaders become more and more dependant on their work status to muscle out a joke? Indeed the effort to get a supportive laugh back at home or in the pub could be significantly bigger than at work.

Alas, there's no study to back that up, but the one thing I have taken the time to observe is the spectacular transformations leaders from these large power distance cultures deliver in international meetings: they sit as quiet listeners in the meeting rooms but gather their country teams and blossom into breezy comediants during the coffee breaks.

Upon observing this I quietly giggled - it was probably though just my emotional self sucking up to my rational self.