once simple and intriguing: They know what the research says. Exper-
iments have found that the use of canned merriment causes an audience
to laugh longer and more often when humorous material is presented
and to rate the material as funnier. In addition, some evidence indicates
that canned laughter is most effective for poor jokes.^1
In the light of these data, the actions of television executives make
perfect sense. The introduction of laugh tracks into their comic program-
ming will increase the humorous and appreciative responses of an
audience, even—and especially—when the material is of poor quality.
Is it any surprise, then, that television, glutted as it is with artless situ-
ation-comedy attempts, should be saturated with canned laughter?
Those executives know precisely what they are doing.
But with the mystery of the widespread use of laugh tracks solved,
we are left with a more perplexing question: Why does canned laughter
work on us the way it does? It is no longer the television executives
who appear peculiar; they are acting logically and in their own interests.
Instead, it is the behavior of the audience, of you and me, that seems
strange. Why should we laugh more at comedy material afloat in a sea
of mechanically fabricated merriment? And why should we think that
comic flotsam funnier? The executives aren’t really fooling us. Anyone
can recognize dubbed laughter. It is so blatant, so clearly counterfeit,
that there could be no confusing it with the real thing. We know full
well that the hilarity we hear is irrelevant to the humorous quality of
the joke it follows, that it is created not spontaneously by a genuine
audience, but artificially by a technician at a control board. Yet, trans-
parent forgery that it is, it works on us!
To discover why canned laughter is so effective, we first need to un-
derstand the nature of yet another potent weapon of influence: the
principle of social proof. It states that one means we use to determine
what is correct is to find out what other people think is correct. The
principle applies especially to the way we decide what constitutes cor-
rect behavior. We view a behavior as more correct in a given situation
to the degree that we see others performing it. Whether the question is
what to do with an empty popcorn box in a movie theater, how fast to
drive on a certain stretch of highway, or how to eat the chicken at a
dinner party, the actions of those around us will be important in defining
the answer.
The tendency to see an action as more appropriate when others are
doing it normally works quite well. As a rule, we will make fewer
mistakes by acting in accord with social evidence than contrary to it.
Usually, when a lot of people are doing something, it is the right thing
to do. This feature of the principle of social proof is simultaneously its
88 / Influence