ABSTRACT
Reflect, for a moment, on the following “thought experiment.” You hear some other people laughing at a joke that, on the face of it, is not particularly funny. You then find out that the people who are laughing are fellow members of a group that you’re a part of and that you value. Would you laugh too? Now let’s say you found out that these laughing others are part of a group that you’re not a member of and, in fact, have no desire to be. Would you laugh along now? If you imagined yourself being more likely to laugh in the first instance than in the second, then you’d be confirming results of one of our own studies of canned laughter (Platow et al., 2005). In that study, people were influenced by the laughter of fellow in-group members, but not by the laughter of out-group members. This simple study demonstrates one of the key arguments in our analysis of leadership: we are influenced primarily by those who are in-group (rather than out-group) members. To influence others, one has to be accepted by them as “one of us.”
