Executive Voiced Laughter and Social Approval: An Explorative Machine Learning Study

We study voiced laughter in executive communication and its effect on social approval. Integrating research on laughter, affect-as-information, and infomediaries' social evaluations of firms, we hypothesize that voiced laughter in executive communication positively affects social approval, defined as audience perceptions of affinity towards an organization. We surmise that the effect of laughter is especially strong for joint laughter, i.e., the number of instances in a given communication venue for which the focal executive and the audience laugh simultaneously. Finally, combining the notions of affect-as-information and negativity bias in human cognition, we hypothesize that the positive effect of laughter on social approval increases with bad organizational performance. We find partial support for our ideas when testing them on panel data comprising 902 German Bundesliga soccer press conferences and media tenor, applying state-of-the-art machine learning approaches for laughter detection as well as sentiment analysis. Our findings contribute to research at the nexus of executive communication, strategic leadership, and social evaluations, especially by introducing laughter as a highly consequential potential, but understudied social lubricant at the executive-infomediary interface. Our research is unique by focusing on reflexive microprocesses of social evaluations, rather than the infomediary-routines perspectives in infomediaries' evaluations. We also make methodological contributions.