Laughter Can Help You Identify True Friends

Paying attention to the way people laugh around you can help in identifying true friends, according to a new study. Laughter can also enable you to demarcate friends from foes.

According to Professor Greg Bryant from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA), people always have the tendency to laugh louder around friends. An individual feels excited and smiles more in the company of friends than among strangers.

To enable the study, a group of researchers led by Bryant played different audio clips of laughter to volunteers from 24 different cultures, which included participants from Peru, Namibia, Austria and Slovakia among others. The audio clips were recorded around 10 years ago, and mostly featured conversations between friends, while others were between strangers.

Later on, the participants were asked to figure out which of the conversations took place between friends, and which ones were recorded among strangers. It was interesting to note that about 61 percent of the time, the volunteers gave the correct answer, in spite of their different cultural background. It was found that the participants came to their conclusions after listening to the laughs in the conversation that were recorded on the audio clips.

The sounds of two females laughing on the audio clips were interpreted as them being friends. The participants assumed that women take a longer time than men to develop friendships that could lead to such genuine laughter together.

"In a highly cooperative species such as ours, it is important for individuals to correctly identify the social alliances of others," Greg Bryant said. "If laughter helps people accomplish that, it has likely played a role in social communication leading to cooperative interactions."

PNAS report suggests that when people are around their friends, they have a tendency to laugh louder as well as be more excited and animated. Furthermore, according to the report, the finding can be used to identify true friends by observing how people react around you, if they laugh boisterously then they take you as a friend.