At "Think again! Laughter, Lies and Gambling"
We were at another Think Again! event, which is a "live psychology panel show". I recommend you try sometime. It's part lecture, part stand-up, part Q&A.
We learned, amongst other things:
- Dogs laugh (play pant);
- All the popular tells to spot a liar are junk; and
- Laughter may have evolved because it's more efficient than grooming in large groups.
Looking up that last one up, I find "Laughter and its role in the evolution of human social bonding" (Dunbar, 2022):
The hypothesis explored here is straight forward: at some point during the course of hominin evolution it (i) became necessary to add a further mechanism to the process of group bonding because the conventional primate mechanism of social grooming reached a limit set by the time available to devote to it, and (ii) that this additional mechanism was laughter because (iii) laughter triggers the same neurophysiological mechanism that underpins primate social bonding without (iv) being subject to the same time and intimacy constraints as grooming.
Once your group hits around 150 (of course it's 150), you'd end up spending over 40% of the daylight just social grooming:
It's a fun idea, from a fun night out.