Speaker 1: Pushkin the sounds of laughter. There are people who study it,
Speaker 1: people like Ben Glenn. This extended sequence of laughs from
Speaker 1: the Jack Benny Program is one of the all time greats.
Speaker 1: Jack Benny was the biggest comedian of his day. His
Speaker 1: show ran on radio and TV for more than thirty years.
Speaker 1: It said that the Jack Benny Show was the only
Speaker 1: program President John F. Kennedy would watch religiously. His jokes
Speaker 1: have probably generated more laughs than anyone in the history
Speaker 1: of comedy. In this scene, comedian Johnny Carson has just
Speaker 1: remarked that he has no idea how Jack Benny stays
Speaker 1: so young. The gag that's slaying the audience is the
Speaker 1: reveal that Jack stays young because he's a robot, and
Speaker 1: his staff are dismantling him bit by bit, putting him
Speaker 1: in storage for the night. But the laughter you're hearing
Speaker 1: from this gag isn't pure. It's sweetened. Sweetening is augmenting
Speaker 1: the authentic reactions of a sitting audience with prerecorded reactions.
Speaker 1: Augmenting authentic reactions. That's the media industry trick you might
Speaker 1: know as canned laughter or a laugh track. The man
Speaker 1: I'm talking to, Ben Glenn is a television historian and
Speaker 1: an expert on the history of this technique. He's listened
Speaker 1: to every faked shriek and spliced in Giffa in USTv history.
Speaker 1: I'm fifty four years old, I am the television generation,
Speaker 1: and I thought to myself, why does nobody ever talk
Speaker 1: about that? Because the laugh track was a critical integral
Speaker 1: part of these shows and of their success. Canned laughter
Speaker 1: is pretty common today, but I was surprised to hear
Speaker 1: the secret history of how this technique developed. The laugh
Speaker 1: track began an earnest in nineteen to fifty when an
Speaker 1: engineer named Charles Douglas, a sound engineer at CBS, developed
Speaker 1: not only the idea that you could insert prerecorded laughter,
Speaker 1: but he also built and designed himself in his garage
Speaker 1: the apparatus to use tape loops of carefully selected reactions
Speaker 1: that could be inserted into television shows. And so where
Speaker 1: did he get those in the original Where did those boys?
Speaker 1: That is the question that everybody asks. So I took
Speaker 1: it upon myself to start digging. The facts are very
Speaker 1: hard to uncover because it was a was meant to
Speaker 1: be a well kept Hollywood secret. Ben's oral detective work
Speaker 1: led him to listen over and over, both to classic
Speaker 1: laugh tracks and early television comedies. In the end, he
Speaker 1: was able to figure out that Douglas made his laugh
Speaker 1: tracks by recording the real studio audiences who watched early
Speaker 1: comedians like Red Skelton, Lucille, Ball and Abbott and Costello.
Speaker 1: There's also a report that some of the earliest ones
Speaker 1: in the nineteen fifties came from a Marcel Marceau performance
Speaker 1: in Los Angeles, and of course that would make sense
Speaker 1: since he was a mime and there was no interfering
Speaker 1: music or any sort of distraction noise, etc. Ben told
Speaker 1: me something that totally blew my mind. Those early laugh
Speaker 1: tracks are still in use today. The exact same guffaws
Speaker 1: and shrieks that people heard in the fifties are still
Speaker 1: sweetening modern TV shows. We are hearing reactions that were
Speaker 1: recorded decades ago. They're dead people, yes, but they live
Speaker 1: on television. Comedies are still using these laughs because they work.
Speaker 1: As I listened to Ben's clips of early comedies, I
Speaker 1: realized that the canned laughter does seem to make jokes funnier,
Speaker 1: even if the gags are pretty dumb, which honestly, many
Speaker 1: of the gags were but why was my brain reacting
Speaker 1: like this? How can the prerecorded laughter of dead people
Speaker 1: I've never met affect my experience of a mostly not
Speaker 1: funny television show today? I mean, are we literally catching
Speaker 1: other people's emotions like the common cold? And if we are,
Speaker 1: how can we inoculate ourselves against the sorts of feelings
Speaker 1: we might not want to catch from other people. Our
Speaker 1: minds are constantly telling us what to do to be happy.
Speaker 1: But what if our minds are wrong? What if our
Speaker 1: minds are lying to us, leading us away from what
Speaker 1: will really make us happy. The good news is that
Speaker 1: understanding the science of the mind can point us all
Speaker 1: back in the right direction. You're listening to the Happiness
Speaker 1: Lab with doctor Laurie Sanders. Modern day laugh tracks are
Speaker 1: only a few decades old, but comedy designers have been
Speaker 1: using similar techniques for centuries. If you think about it,
Speaker 1: In the sixteenth century Shakespearean plays, they were performed in
Speaker 1: front of an extremely raucous audience, where the audience cheer
Speaker 1: the protagonist and booed the villain. There are actually accounts
Speaker 1: of Shakespeare planted people in the audience to react in
Speaker 1: a certain way to spur on the audience members around.
Speaker 1: Shakespeare wasn't alone. There's a long, long history of seating
Speaker 1: live audiences like this. The opera houses of France employed
Speaker 1: whole groups of claquers, hired guns who sat in the auditorium,
Speaker 1: primed to lead the paying audience in whatever reaction the
Speaker 1: script required. Some members of the claque even had specializations.
Speaker 1: Rearers were expert laughers, while plurers could summon tears at will.
Speaker 1: Early television producers also realized the power of these techniques.
Speaker 1: They would have loved to hire professional claquers to enhance
Speaker 1: their studio audience's reaction, but they couldn't afford something that extravagant.
Speaker 1: Charles Douglas's new advance in laughter technology offered a tantalizing,
Speaker 1: albeit totally fabricated alternative. The entire process was it was
Speaker 1: artificial from beginning to end. In a few years, Douglas
Speaker 1: was able to raise his laugh track from simple canned
Speaker 1: laughter to an art form. He wasn't just lifting laughs.
Speaker 1: It was as though he was a conductor and the
Speaker 1: laughing audience members were his orchestra. He would sit up
Speaker 1: late at night in his living room and he would
Speaker 1: be listening to tape loops and splicing and extracting reaction.
Speaker 1: He engineered them to bring a certain individual laugh to
Speaker 1: the surface and to suppress ambient laughter. They often were
Speaker 1: sped up to make it seem even more kind of
Speaker 1: jolly or more intensely funny. The machine he built held
Speaker 1: up to three hundred twenty reactions. Douglas's new machine allowed
Speaker 1: him to become the master of television emotional manipulation, but
Speaker 1: most shows couldn't afford his exquisite new craft. Charles Douglas
Speaker 1: charged about one hundred dollars per day, if that was
Speaker 1: over budget. For some production companies, they found some i
Speaker 1: have to say, sort of low budget pre existing laugh track.
Speaker 1: For example, The Adventures of Seen Harriet, which was an
Speaker 1: enormously popular show in its day, used only one reaction
Speaker 1: regardless of situation. So it's like the same laugh, it's
Speaker 1: the same lay, the exact same laugh. But shows soon
Speaker 1: recognized they needed to be a little bit more professional
Speaker 1: with their sweetening to make the jokestick, which put Douglas's
Speaker 1: laugh track in even more demand. And that's when Douglas
Speaker 1: realized he could start sweetening more than just the laughs.
Speaker 1: What we see is that the laugh track expands beyond
Speaker 1: just laughter, and these are some of my favorite reactions.
Speaker 1: There is shock, there are you know, women kind of squealing.
Speaker 1: Oh oh. So the laugh track expanded beyond just laughter
Speaker 1: to include the full range of how an audience might react.
Speaker 1: But why was Douglas's techniques so powerful? Why does hearing
Speaker 1: the squeals of people we've never met change our own
Speaker 1: reaction to a television show? Well, if you've listened to
Speaker 1: some of the previous episodes, you know the experiencing an event,
Speaker 1: say eating a piece of chocolate at the same time
Speaker 1: as another person, can make those events more intense. But
Speaker 1: psychology shows the experiencing an event with another person can
Speaker 1: also change our experience of that event in other ways
Speaker 1: as well. Are thinking in our reactions, and really the
Speaker 1: psychology of what we're watching can be changed by the
Speaker 1: reactions around us. Psychologists have long documented the fact that
Speaker 1: we tend to copy other people's behavior unconsciously, and most
Speaker 1: of the time without even realizing it. In one study
Speaker 1: by Tanya Chartrand and colleagues, subjects were brought into the
Speaker 1: lab and told they needed to work with another person
Speaker 1: to describe a set of magazine photos, but the photos
Speaker 1: were not part of the experiment. Unbeknownst to the subject,
Speaker 1: the people chosen as their partners were actually experimental clackers,
Speaker 1: or confederates, as scientists called them. They were people hired
Speaker 1: by the experimenters to behave in a very specific way.
Speaker 1: They rub their face a bunch, or sometimes touch their
Speaker 1: feet over and over. Chartrand and colleagues wanted to know
Speaker 1: how these behaviors affected the subjects. It turns out being
Speaker 1: around someone touching their face caused the research subjects to
Speaker 1: touch their own faces more often, whereas being around someone
Speaker 1: who touched their feet caused participants to touch their feet
Speaker 1: more often. Even though both of these behaviors are really weird,
Speaker 1: this result and lots of others, show that we tend
Speaker 1: to unconsciously mimic the behavior of others, a phenomena that
Speaker 1: researchers christened the chameleon effect. We're literally catching other people's behavior,
Speaker 1: but we don't just catch other people's behavior. Researchers have
Speaker 1: long realized that there's a tight link between behaving in
Speaker 1: a certain way and feeling a certain way. The act
Speaker 1: of behaving in a certain way, say smiling or frowning,
Speaker 1: can influence how we feel. Are just shown that adopting
Speaker 1: a happy facial expression can unconsciously improve our mood. There
Speaker 1: also studies showing that when you can't make facial expressions,
Speaker 1: it becomes harder to experience emotions. Chartrands showed this in
Speaker 1: an unusual experiment. She tested whether women who receive botox injections,
Speaker 1: which paralyzes facial muscles, have trouble recognizing emotions in others.
Speaker 1: She found that not being able to make a particular
Speaker 1: facial expression makes it harder to recognize that emotion in others.
Speaker 1: What does all this have to do with the laugh track? Well,
Speaker 1: if audience members naturally copy the reactions of those around them,
Speaker 1: then they'll not only behave differently when they hear a
Speaker 1: laugh track chuckling a bit more, but they'll also feel
Speaker 1: differently because of emotional contagion. We're literally catching other people's emotions.
Speaker 1: Hearing other people laugh at a joke makes us think
Speaker 1: that the joke is actually funnier. It's reassuring, like, oh, yes,
Speaker 1: I'm not the only one who finds that funny. That
Speaker 1: validates me that is funny. Humans are not just behavioral chameleons,
Speaker 1: but emotional chameleons as well. We're as susceptible to the
Speaker 1: emotions around us as we are to a highly contagious disease,
Speaker 1: but we don't often like to think that our emotions
Speaker 1: can be so fickle, which meant that, despite its pervasiveness,
Speaker 1: not everyone was a fan of Douglas's laugh track technology.
Speaker 1: I think the term canned laughter was pejorative and was
Speaker 1: used by critics and probably producers and writers who looked
Speaker 1: down upon the use of prerecorded reactions. But laugh tracks
Speaker 1: persist because they really do work. They make a show
Speaker 1: seem funnier, whether or not we like to admit it.
Speaker 1: That becomes clear when you listen to shows that forego
Speaker 1: a little sweetening. Some networks tried to embark upon what
Speaker 1: they called a prestige sitcom which had no laugh track
Speaker 1: at all. One called Frank's Place on CBS. There was
Speaker 1: one called The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd, and
Speaker 1: they wore this as a badge of honor, like we
Speaker 1: need known laugh track. They went nowhere, They fizzled, and
Speaker 1: who remembers them. Right When I teach my class at Yale,
Speaker 1: I show students a modern day TV show without its clackers,
Speaker 1: just to make the very same point, ah, nothing makes
Speaker 1: beauty is better than cool clear Rocky Mountains, spring Water,
Speaker 1: so Big Bang theory on YouTube. Somebody's gone in and
Speaker 1: clipped out the laugh track and it sounds super weird.
Speaker 1: Are the Rocky Mountains anyway? Philadelphia? It's not like they're
Speaker 1: not they're not jokes, but they's they just fill it
Speaker 1: with this to sort of propel you into thinking everything
Speaker 1: is funny. How we hear other people reacting is contagious.
Speaker 1: Laugh tracks are one of the most common cases of
Speaker 1: emotional contagion in action. Whether or not we want to
Speaker 1: admit it. We do enjoy TV shows more when there's
Speaker 1: can't laughter, But emotional contagion can also be used in
Speaker 1: more insidious ways, because not everyone out there wants to
Speaker 1: make us laugh. Some companies today make money not by
Speaker 1: making us feel good, but by making us feel a
Speaker 1: whole lot worse. The Happiness Lab will be right back.
Speaker 1: I opened up my email and there were hundreds of
Speaker 1: emails that were all mostly like how dare you do this?
Speaker 1: And you're so unethical? Or other friends writing me saying, hey,
Speaker 1: you better get a lawyer, and I hope you're okay.
Speaker 1: This is my friend Jeff Hancock back in twenty fourteen,
Speaker 1: Jeff opened up a firestorm of hate in his inbox,
Speaker 1: and over the course of the next five or six days,
Speaker 1: you know, I could literally tell where the sun was
Speaker 1: up around the world by where I was receiving hate
Speaker 1: mail from. I distinctly remember watching all this happen, just
Speaker 1: the crazy level of outrage that Jeff had elicited. I
Speaker 1: was worried about him. Many of our college or two
Speaker 1: what had Jeff done to generate so much fury from
Speaker 1: complete strangers. He ran an experiment to manipulate people's emotions online,
Speaker 1: and they didn't like it. I often remember the first
Speaker 1: time I read about emotion contagion, and the metaphor that
Speaker 1: the author used was you could cut the emotions in
Speaker 1: the room with a knife, and I know that feeling.
Speaker 1: You walk into a room and you can be like, oh,
Speaker 1: it's tense in here. Most psychologists study emotional contagion in
Speaker 1: the context of real world social interactions like these, but
Speaker 1: Jeff wanted to know whether we could catch people's emotions
Speaker 1: in more subtle ways as well, like through a relatively
Speaker 1: new form of human communication writing. So until the nineteen forties,
Speaker 1: over half of the planet's population was illiterate, so they
Speaker 1: never left any record of any their communication. And now
Speaker 1: you know, if you would ask one of your podcast
Speaker 1: listeners if they'd written something today, almost everybody would say, yes,
Speaker 1: we forget that text is a completely new form of
Speaker 1: communication for our species. And for a long time, most
Speaker 1: scientists simply assumed that emotions couldn't transmit as easily through
Speaker 1: written word as they did face to face. I really
Speaker 1: hated this sort of idea that you can't communicate emotions
Speaker 1: in text like an emails and things like that. Jeff's
Speaker 1: research showed that participants pick up other people's emotions through
Speaker 1: text and say a quick email note or an online
Speaker 1: comment just as easily as they do in face to
Speaker 1: face real world interactions. On the one hand, is like surprising,
Speaker 1: like wow, how can you tell emotions in text? And
Speaker 1: then you think about your favorite author, and of course
Speaker 1: you have like these super powerful feelings from text. I
Speaker 1: remember reading Game of Thrones and there's this red wedding
Speaker 1: event where people that you aren't expecting to be killed
Speaker 1: to get killed, and I was so furious I had
Speaker 1: to stop reading and go for a walk. And it
Speaker 1: was just one of these examples of like, yeah, why do.
Speaker 1: We think that you can't communicate emotion through text or online,
Speaker 1: But there are a number of reasons why the text
Speaker 1: we read online is a different communication medium than the
Speaker 1: quick emotions we experience around other people. The first difference
Speaker 1: is longevity. When I laugh at a funny joke, you
Speaker 1: only hear that signal for a few seconds. But text,
Speaker 1: especially the text we post online, is really different. It's
Speaker 1: true that up until very recently in human history, everything
Speaker 1: we said and did disappear, and now we leave records.
Speaker 1: The records people leave can continue affecting our emotions for
Speaker 1: years and years to come. My favorite writer, Kurt Vonnegut's
Speaker 1: been dead for years, but his quotes still make me
Speaker 1: laugh and sometimes cringe. But there's a second way that text,
Speaker 1: especially text on the Internet, is different. We don't have
Speaker 1: as much control over who is affecting our emotions. We
Speaker 1: evolve to be around a small number of people, which
Speaker 1: means that most face to face emotional contagion only occurs
Speaker 1: between people who know each other well. But on the Internet,
Speaker 1: we're emotionally affected both by people who are close to
Speaker 1: and by people never even meet. In real life, I
Speaker 1: should have a contagious sort of feeling. If my mom
Speaker 1: posts something that's stopped setting for her, I should feel
Speaker 1: some empathy and negative response. But if I'm looking through
Speaker 1: the comments of a hockey game that took place last night,
Speaker 1: and I'm reading the comments, somebody named Poster number eighty
Speaker 1: three is upset or angry, that should have zero bearing
Speaker 1: on my emotional situation. And yet because of some of
Speaker 1: the automatic aspects of the way we respond to others emotions,
Speaker 1: it can trigger things to me. When we're on the internet.
Speaker 1: We don't only succumb to the emotions of people like
Speaker 1: our family members, people we know and care about. Then
Speaker 1: there's these sort of like unknown people that I never
Speaker 1: expect to meet again, I don't have any idea who
Speaker 1: they actually are. And we can call that the unknown network.
Speaker 1: And this could be some Russian agent, could be some
Speaker 1: fraud strode in Nigeria, and typically in the face to
Speaker 1: face world, it's really easy to keep those two kinds
Speaker 1: of contacts separate, so those two networks aren't overlapping. But
Speaker 1: on the Internet and something like a Facebook news feed,
Speaker 1: those two worlds are completely overlaid and they sit right
Speaker 1: on top of each other. It's just as easy for
Speaker 1: a Russian agent to put something in my feed or
Speaker 1: my advertising space as it is for LORI. And this
Speaker 1: means that our emotions aren't just affected by the people
Speaker 1: that matter. We're also, in theory catching the emotions of
Speaker 1: third cousins we haven't seen in years, random strangers, advertisers, bots,
Speaker 1: really anything that winds up in our news feed. Everybody's
Speaker 1: news feed is super huge, it turns out, because of
Speaker 1: network effects. If you have say, three hundred friends on Facebook,
Speaker 1: you'll have thousands of possible pieces of content to look
Speaker 1: at in your news feed. And what Facebook very quickly
Speaker 1: found out was that much of that people found on
Speaker 1: interesting and unengaging, and so they developed algorithms to try
Speaker 1: and predict what the say, twenty to thirty most interesting
Speaker 1: pieces for a person be. Basically what happens is a
Speaker 1: piece of content would come and the algorithm would rank
Speaker 1: and say, well, Jeff would be really interested this, we're
Speaker 1: going to put at the top of his feed, or
Speaker 1: he wouldn't at all, we're going to put it down.
Speaker 1: You know. In fifteen hundred and so, everybody's news feed
Speaker 1: is algorithmically curated. And now in twenty nineteen, most people
Speaker 1: know this, and I think in twenty fourteen. This was
Speaker 1: not well known and I think was a big part
Speaker 1: of the outrage. Ah, yes, the outrage. So why did
Speaker 1: everyone get so mad at Jeff Well. Facebook was interested
Speaker 1: to see if it's users were experiencing emotional contagion from
Speaker 1: the post they read. In particular, they were worried about
Speaker 1: some studies that were coming out suggesting that people might
Speaker 1: feel bad when they look at their news feed. You
Speaker 1: would be very bad for a lot of obvious reasons
Speaker 1: if they're one of their main key products was causing
Speaker 1: their users to be depressed or causing negative emotion. The
Speaker 1: social media giant design an experiment to figure out the
Speaker 1: emotional impact of Facebook posts. Unbeknownst to the subjects, it
Speaker 1: decided to tweak the newsfeed algorithm for two different test
Speaker 1: groups of users. The first group, the negative content group,
Speaker 1: was picked to see less bad content in their news feed.
Speaker 1: It never went away, it was always in your feed,
Speaker 1: just you know, you'd be less likely to see it.
Speaker 1: But there was another group or condition who saw their
Speaker 1: news feed altered in the other emotional direction. So if
Speaker 1: you were in the positive emotion condition, you know, even
Speaker 1: more controversial condition. Then when posts had positive emotion them,
Speaker 1: they'd be moved down in your feeding, you'd be less
Speaker 1: likely to see them. How did this change to a
Speaker 1: person's feed affect the emotions that they themselves expressed in
Speaker 1: their own posts? Were users automatically catching the emotions they
Speaker 1: saw in their feeds? That's what we found. And so
Speaker 1: if you were in the fewer positive posts condition, then
Speaker 1: you would write about four positive words fewer over the
Speaker 1: next thousand words that you post on Facebook. Jeff and
Speaker 1: his colleagues had shown that people do catch the emotions
Speaker 1: they see in their feed It was an important result.
Speaker 1: People online many that you've never even met, or able
Speaker 1: to make you feel happier or sadder in your real
Speaker 1: offline life. I got a little bit of media attention.
Speaker 1: I remember Jimmy Fallon actually cracked a joke about it
Speaker 1: in one of his monologues. I remember being like, okay,
Speaker 1: right on, Jimmy Fallon crack's joke, that's a check mark great,
Speaker 1: and after that thought like, okay, I guess that'll be
Speaker 1: sort of it for the study. Jeff couldn't have been
Speaker 1: more wrong. The hate mail started arriving, and not just
Speaker 1: for weeks after his study, but for years. How dare
Speaker 1: you manipulate my news feed? And the public anger he
Speaker 1: stirred didn't just hurt him. My wife was really negatively
Speaker 1: affected emotion with it. I mean she was turned on
Speaker 1: the radio, the TV, or fire up her email or
Speaker 1: go on Twitter, and would just be seeing all these
Speaker 1: like takedowns of her husband being an unethical monster, and
Speaker 1: you forget that, like, your work isn't just you, but
Speaker 1: it's also all the people around you that have supported it.
Speaker 1: Jeff's study raised questions that had never before been asked
Speaker 1: about the role of social media in our emotional lives.
Speaker 1: I think for a long time people kind of viewed
Speaker 1: those as two different worlds. There's like stuff that happens
Speaker 1: on social media or online and it's like whatever, and
Speaker 1: then there's the real world. People really recognized all of
Speaker 1: a sudden that like, hey, these are both real worlds,
Speaker 1: and what you read and the emotions you get from
Speaker 1: learning about your social network, they don't drop off once
Speaker 1: you turn the screen off. They actually stay with you
Speaker 1: and they can influence your physical interactions. One thing has
Speaker 1: changed for Jeff though his study has changed the kinds
Speaker 1: of emotional things he posts online. I certainly try to
Speaker 1: be a positive person. Whenever I'm using any sort of
Speaker 1: form of technology, I'm very aware of the possible effects
Speaker 1: of writing negative things. Jeff's onto something here. Something will
Speaker 1: explore in more detail after the break. When we first
Speaker 1: hear about the Facebook study, we can feel existentially threatened
Speaker 1: from laugh tracks to biased news feeds. It can seem
Speaker 1: like other people are constantly affecting us, and as though
Speaker 1: our emotions are completely out of our control, even subject
Speaker 1: to manipulation. But when you start to understand how these
Speaker 1: techniques work, when you begin realizing that these forces are
Speaker 1: being used against you, you can react in a more
Speaker 1: positive way to all of this emotional contagion, because just
Speaker 1: as we are affected by the emotions of others, so
Speaker 1: to do our emotions affect other people. And that means
Speaker 1: that we can have a lot more control over our
Speaker 1: own emotional climate than we often think. We can become
Speaker 1: the laugh track we want to hear in the world.
Speaker 1: The Happiness Lab will be back in a moment when
Speaker 1: my youngest child was very very young, probably about four
Speaker 1: or so, and I was reprimanding her for something, not
Speaker 1: particularly aggressively, but just reprimanding. She said to me, you
Speaker 1: are making me have negative emotional contagion, and I'm kind
Speaker 1: of like, well, that's sort of the point. Actually, this
Speaker 1: is Seagal Barsade. She's a professor at the Wharton School
Speaker 1: of Business. Seagal is an expert on emotional contagion and
Speaker 1: specifically how we can use this phenomenon to make ourselves
Speaker 1: and our organizations a little bit happier. The reason I
Speaker 1: started to study emotional contagion was because I was in
Speaker 1: a workplace and there was a woman in the workplace
Speaker 1: who worked there. Will call her Megan, and I didn't
Speaker 1: report to her. I didn't actually need to even work
Speaker 1: with her a lot. But she was a very negative person.
Speaker 1: And one day she left for vacation, and I noticed
Speaker 1: that there was a palpable difference in the workplace among
Speaker 1: everybody who was in this open office. People's shoulders almost
Speaker 1: like seemed to lower, and they were more relaxed and happy.
Speaker 1: Then when she came back from vacation, everything went back
Speaker 1: to what it was, and I remember thinking, Wow, this
Speaker 1: person is having this tremendous effect on our mood even
Speaker 1: when we don't literally have to engage with her around
Speaker 1: workplace issues. Seagal has explored how moods transmit through an organization.
Speaker 1: How emotional contagion can shape an entire group or even
Speaker 1: an entire workplace culture. You can imagine a work group
Speaker 1: where you know, somebody comes in in a really great mood,
Speaker 1: everybody else is, let's say, kind of neutral. That person
Speaker 1: comes in, they're bubbly, they're warm, and that infects everybody else.
Speaker 1: Or you can also imagine the opposite, which is somebody
Speaker 1: comes in, they're in a really bad mood, and everybody
Speaker 1: was kind of fine, but now they're feeling it. Most often,
Speaker 1: it's coming as a very automatic process as a result
Speaker 1: of behavioral mimicry, mimicking the facial expressions and body language,
Speaker 1: and then through a variety of physiological processes where actually
Speaker 1: feeling those emotions. The process Seagal describes is pretty intuitive.
Speaker 1: It's probably obvious that people can affect others moods in
Speaker 1: the workplace, but as an organizational theorist, I was also
Speaker 1: interested in, Okay, if this happens, does it matter, you know,
Speaker 1: does it influence anything? Behaviorally, Seagal tested whether the contagion
Speaker 1: led to bad workplace outcomes. She had her workers do
Speaker 1: a bunch of financial decision tasks, including making hard decisions
Speaker 1: about monetary allocations. Did workers make worse decisions when in
Speaker 1: the presence of a single bad mooded confederate. What we
Speaker 1: found is that in the positive emotional contagion conditions, the
Speaker 1: groups were less conflictual, more cooperative, and they literally allocated
Speaker 1: the money differently. The pot of money they were more
Speaker 1: collectivistic in how they did it. This was very powerful
Speaker 1: evidence for the idea that a, Yes, emotions are contagious
Speaker 1: and b that they actually influence work outcomes. Seagull's study
Speaker 1: has now been replicated in a number of experimental in
Speaker 1: field settings, from cricket teams to bank branches to coffee shops.
Speaker 1: Much like the flu, a single bad mood can transmit fast.
Speaker 1: It can influence the performance of an entire team. It
Speaker 1: can even affect the way frontline workers interact with their customers.
Speaker 1: One of the most insidious parts of workplace contagion is
Speaker 1: the fact that the process is reciprocal. One negative feeling
Speaker 1: Megan in the office doesn't just make the folks around
Speaker 1: her grumpy. Those folks then become their own influences, making
Speaker 1: everyone more annoyed and more stressed, and on and on
Speaker 1: and on. This sort of emotional feedback loop is what
Speaker 1: Seagal refers to as an affective spiral. We literally do spiral,
Speaker 1: and we can have upward spirals and we can have
Speaker 1: downward spirals. The problem is that we often forget such
Speaker 1: spirals are as common as they really are time and
Speaker 1: time again, and research studies it's own that people don't
Speaker 1: actually know it's occurring. And in some ways, what I
Speaker 1: find so exciting about being able to talk to this
Speaker 1: to people is that by letting them know that it
Speaker 1: is a phenomenon that is happening, then you are much
Speaker 1: more aware of it if you want to protect yourself
Speaker 1: against the emotional contagion. Because we all have our megans
Speaker 1: in the office, you know, for better or for worse, Yes,
Speaker 1: exactly well, and you know what, we're all megans in
Speaker 1: some ways. And what I mean by that is that
Speaker 1: you know we have moods, right, We all vary and
Speaker 1: quite dramatically throughout the day, throughout the week, and so
Speaker 1: being really conscious of that can help us understand how
Speaker 1: we're affecting other people. See golled onto something really important here.
Speaker 1: If we don't work on our own emotions, we can
Speaker 1: inadvertently start a downward spiral ourselves. Our negativity will likely
Speaker 1: get caught by others around us, which can then get
Speaker 1: transmitted back to us. We can inadvertently be the first
Speaker 1: bad step and a causal chain that leads us to
Speaker 1: experience more misery. Luckily, Seagull's research has shown lots of
Speaker 1: ways that we can alter our expressions to smooth out
Speaker 1: otherwise negative emotional situations, both at work and beyond. Let's
Speaker 1: say you're in a job interview with somebody and you
Speaker 1: see that they're very nervous. You know, one of the
Speaker 1: worst things you can say to somebody is, you know,
Speaker 1: calm down right. If you sort of slow your pace
Speaker 1: a little bit, you look encouragingly, you change your tone
Speaker 1: as you can probably hear in what I'm doing right now,
Speaker 1: that will naturally calm that person down so that you
Speaker 1: can get kind of a more clear interview. As a leader,
Speaker 1: you know, if you have people panicking around you, for example,
Speaker 1: model for them the emotions that are going to be
Speaker 1: the most productive in that situation. If you're sophisticated about
Speaker 1: understanding that, you have this other way of getting your
Speaker 1: team on board and where they need to be. Seagal
Speaker 1: has focused a lot of her research on the one
Speaker 1: member of a team that has the most powerful role
Speaker 1: in a team's emotions, the boss. When I hear about
Speaker 1: a group or an organization that has really low morale,
Speaker 1: one of the first questions I'm asking is, how's the
Speaker 1: leader coming in in the morning. You know, is a
Speaker 1: leader coming in excited, enthusiastic, energetic talking with people, or
Speaker 1: is the leader coming in looking like they have the
Speaker 1: weight of the world on their shoulders and really stressed.
Speaker 1: People are always paying attention to leaders, and so they
Speaker 1: literally catch the leader's mood. Seagal is currently working on
Speaker 1: a number of training programs to get leaders to regulate
Speaker 1: their feelings, both internally and externally in ways that best
Speaker 1: help the group. But the first step is simply realizing
Speaker 1: that one's emotions can affect a team's mood and its performance.
Speaker 1: Knowledge is empowering. Things like you're doing now with this
Speaker 1: episode allow people to know that this exists, and it's
Speaker 1: empowering because there are things that you can do to
Speaker 1: try to not catch somebody else's emotions. The other empowering
Speaker 1: piece of this, though, is knowing that we can change
Speaker 1: each other's moods. The good news is that Seagull's work
Speaker 1: suggests that we can be the emotional change we want
Speaker 1: to see in the world. I asked her if this
Speaker 1: work has made her hopeful, if she thinks we really
Speaker 1: can tackle all the negative office megans in our lives. Absolutely,
Speaker 1: the affective spiral can begin with us. Absolutely. So what
Speaker 1: have we learned in this episode? First, we are affected
Speaker 1: by other people's emotions, way way more than we realize.
Speaker 1: We unconsciously and automatically catch the grief, despair, excitement, rage,
Speaker 1: joy sadness, and serenity of all the individuals we encounter,
Speaker 1: whether that person is a close friend at a party,
Speaker 1: the guy behind us in line at a coffee shop,
Speaker 1: some ranting idiot on Reddit, or even the voice of
Speaker 1: some long dead fifties man laughing hysterically on a bad sitcom.
Speaker 1: By instinctually copying others' behaviors, we irresistibly take on what
Speaker 1: they feel, whether we like that feeling or not. But
Speaker 1: we've also learned that we have more agency than we think.
Speaker 1: We can be more aware of how the people we
Speaker 1: interact with online are affecting us, and mindful of what
Speaker 1: we ourselves post. We can have control over whether we're
Speaker 1: the office Megan, or that burst of calm in a
Speaker 1: tough moment, or the laugh that everyone really really needs.
Speaker 1: And that means that listening to this podcast and following
Speaker 1: its advice won't just help your happiness, Making changes in
Speaker 1: your own life can be the positive seed that transforms
Speaker 1: the well being of those around you. So if you'd
Speaker 1: like to be a force for good to help make
Speaker 1: joy just a little bit more viral, I hope you'll
Speaker 1: return for the next episode of The Happiness Lab with
Speaker 1: me Doctor Laurie Santos. The Happiness Lab is co written
Speaker 1: and produced by Ryan Dilley. The show is mixed and
Speaker 1: mastered by Evan Viola and edited by Julia Barton, fact
Speaker 1: checking by Joseph Fridman, and our original music was composed
Speaker 1: by Zachary Silver. Special thanks to Mia La Belle, Carly mcgliori,
Speaker 1: Heather Faine, Maggie Taylor, Maya Kanig, and Jacob Weisberg. The
Speaker 1: Happiness Lab is brought to you by Pushkin Industries and
Speaker 1: me Doctor Laurie Santos.