Laughter, a universal language of joy, can sometimes take a sinister turn, evoking fear instead of happiness. But why does this happen? Let's delve into the psychology behind this paradoxical phenomenon and unravel the mystery of scary laughter.
There’s something about a cackling clown or a chuckling robot that can convince us of imminent doom
A lot of fear stems from dissonance or violation of our expectation
- Whenever we take something that’s supposed to be linked to positive emotions, feelings of innocence or joy, and then flip it in some way, by either making it a little bit sinister or out of context, it sends a red flag” or an error message
- People shouldn’t be happy about doing bad things, so when they are… that’s a cue that something’s not right and we can’t trust them.”
At a physiological level, laughter and fear are very similar
They are both “high-arousal states,” or times when we are feeling intense emotions
- Culture also plays a role in how we perceive laughter
- In Western society, we learn to associate laughter with positive feelings, but in some cultures that aren’t necessarily globally connected, the sound of laughter can prompt uneasiness
- If you go into cultures that haven’t had a lot of exposure to mainstream media, laughter can be very strange just in general
A few months ago, Amazon’s Alexa virtual assistant randomly broke out laughing, unprompted, in people’s homes, terrifying people
The reason for the assistant’s hilarity was that Alexa sometimes mistakenly thought someone was saying, “Alexa, laugh.”
- When we hear our GPS or Alexa or Siri respond affectionately, they’re always doing so in response to something we’ve done.
- “They have no independently motivated expressions of emotions.”
- But when Alexa randomly laughs on its own, “it introduces this problem of “Why is Alexa laughing?” [when] it’s supposed to be something that is detached from sentiment.”
