Socializing High Status Dudes Dont Laugh?

[Kaida]

I’ve time and time again noticed that when a dude I see as really cool and high status really lets himself go with a laugh, his “aura” of charisma seems to deflate a decent amount.


This isn’t just me either, the people who laugh the least - at least in my experience - tend to be respected a decent amount more as long as they’re sufficiently social / charismatic otherwise (The people who dont laugh and arent social tend to be avoided / talked about negatively). This seems quite important as it can make or break peoples perceptions, and can kill your interactions with girls.


I tend to laugh a lot (sometimes awkwardly) and also really let myself go with it. However, I’ve also noticed on those great days when I’m coming across as super magnetic and high status, I tend not to laugh as much as well even if everyone around me is letting themselves go with a laugh.


Do cool people just not laugh as much? What’s the nuance?

 

[Zoro]

Interesting.

I don’t think it’s that high value people don’t laugh. It’s that high value people laugh with people they have rapport with.

I have friends I’d consider high value, and they laugh a lot, and it’s in moments where there is a good connection established and something funny/laughable has happened, so that’s why rapport is important here.

Perhaps it seems they laugh less because they don’t need laughter to break tension/cope with anxiety as much as low value people do.

Low value people will also use laughter as a way to gain favor build rapport (laughing at jokes that aren’t funny) which high value people won’t do either.

That being said, I don’t think laughing is bad, it’s just that high value people behave in different ways and those behaviors are generally more attractive. So instead of laughing to break tension because they’re nervous, you’ll see them laugh at something genuinely funny with someone they have good rapport with.

 

[TomInHo]

I’ve time and time again noticed that when a dude I see as really cool and high status really lets himself go with a laugh, his “aura” of charisma seems to deflate a decent amount.


This isn’t just me either, the people who laugh the least - at least in my experience - tend to be respected a decent amount more as long as they’re sufficiently social / charismatic otherwise (The people who dont laugh and arent social tend to be avoided / talked about negatively). This seems quite important as it can make or break peoples perceptions, and can kill your interactions with girls.


I tend to laugh a lot (sometimes awkwardly) and also really let myself go with it. However, I’ve also noticed on those great days when I’m coming across as super magnetic and high status, I tend not to laugh as much as well even if everyone around me is letting themselves go with a laugh.


Do cool people just not laugh as much? What’s the nuance?

You might be reading too much into it. A high status guy can still enjoy a good laugh. But usually, people who laugh as a way to please others don't rank high in the social heirachy.

So to keep things simple..

Feel free to laugh if it's funny

And if it's not... go ahead and punch them in the face for wasting your time with lame jokes

 

[Kaida]

You might be reading too much into it.

Probably. Im still a beginner and doing some heavy socializing right now, so I tend to think a lot about the little things

You might be reading too much into it. A high status guy can still enjoy a good laugh. But usually, people who laugh as a way to please others don't rank high in the social heirachy.

So to keep things simple..

Feel free to laugh if it's funny

And if it's not... go ahead and punch them in the face for wasting your time with lame jokes

Great notes. Thanks!

 

[Fuck This]

Laughing is like putting out. If you laugh at every funny line, you are a Laugh slut...its cheap. If you don't laugh at all you are a laugh prude... uptight

When you "put out" a laugh make sure it is genuine and worthwhile. Then it will be appreciated by those around you.

 

[StrayDog]

Just make the laugh is genuine and not a nervous laugh. Nervous laughs are low status as they indicate a disease with tension, the nervous laugh is an attempt to diffuse the tension. It comes across as low value. A genuine laugh comes from the belly and has a certain light in the eyes. It is the result of actually finding something funny. Genuine laughter creates bonding and camaraderie. Even if you are the only one laughing, the vibe of it is infectious (so long as you are not laughing at the other person in a cruel or condescending way). So yeah, like the other guys said: If it is genuinely funny, laugh.

 

[Winston]

I have plenty of examples of charismatic guys that laugh and smile very often.
When you laugh or smile, you are signaling a level of well-being that is actually rare: you are happy and dont have any visible worries. This is a kind of display of mastery of the harshness of life, and this is something very valuable in the social world.

Like had already being said, it depends on the way laughing and smiling are done, it can come accross as low social value if it is done in an approval-seeking way.

 

[trashKENNUT]

Hello

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z@c+

 

[Chase]

Who's the most charismatic guy in this video?

Look at how Cruise is laughing though. He does it in a way that draws all the attention to him (it's a very physical laugh), comments on the performance (approving of it), and makes eye contact with those around them as if to say "Go ahead and laugh, it's funny."

It's kind of a goofy situation, and Seth MacFarlane is really making himself look like a bit of a goof here... actually I have a video I shot for GirlsChase.TV (not uploaded yet) on pattern interrupts where I have a Kermit prop, and wanted to do a little fun Kermit voice at the end... I'm pretty good at impressions... but it was just too goofy me doing that and I didn't include it.

Anyway, another thing Cruise is doing by laughing so much here is defusing the awkwardness of MacFarlane doing a Kermit impression like some clown in the chair. If Cruise just sat there smiling and nodding... well, it's not quite enough to defuse that awkwardness. So Cruise laughs ridiculously at the ludicrousness of the impression.

@Hector Papi Castillo is someone who laughs a lot and laughs exactly this way, very physically moving his body around, laughing in a high status / energetic dude way.

Not every high status guy will laugh this way, or as frequently. You can also do small smiles acknowledging the humor if it's only a little bit funny to you. That's more for the "high status collected guy."

I usually just do a smile or a small laugh. There's not much that really gets me laughing hard.

However, if it is really, really ridiculous, and some ridiculous laughter is called for to defuse the awkward ludicrousness, then I will be doing the animated laughing thing as well, both to chill the guy being absurd out and to signal to everyone else there it is okay to laugh at this guy's silly stuff he is doing for laughs.

Chase

 

[Zoro]

Who's the most charismatic guy in this video?

Look at how Cruise is laughing though. He does it in a way that draws all the attention to him (it's a very physical laugh), comments on the performance (approving of it), and makes eye contact with those around them as if to say "Go ahead and laugh, it's funny."

It's kind of a goofy situation, and Seth MacFarlane is really making himself look like a bit of a goof here... actually I have a video I shot for GirlsChase.TV (not uploaded yet) on pattern interrupts where I have a Kermit prop, and wanted to do a little fun Kermit voice at the end... I'm pretty good at impressions... but it was just too goofy me doing that and I didn't include it.

Anyway, another thing Cruise is doing by laughing so much here is defusing the awkwardness of MacFarlane doing a Kermit impression like some clown in the chair. If Cruise just sat there smiling and nodding... well, it's not quite enough to defuse that awkwardness. So Cruise laughs ridiculously at the ludicrousness of the impression.

@Hector Papi Castillo is someone who laughs a lot and laughs exactly this way, very physically moving his body around, laughing in a high status / energetic dude way.

Not every high status guy will laugh this way, or as frequently. You can also do small smiles acknowledging the humor if it's only a little bit funny to you. That's more for the "high status collected guy."

I usually just do a smile or a small laugh. There's not much that really gets me laughing hard.

However, if it is really, really ridiculous, and some ridiculous laughter is called for to defuse the awkward ludicrousness, then I will be doing the animated laughing thing as well, both to chill the guy being absurd out and to signal to everyone else there it is okay to laugh at this guy's silly stuff he is doing for laughs.

Chase

Huh, that’s really interesting. I mentioned in my post that high value people won’t laugh to diffuse tension.

But you made a great distinction here, while they won’t have to ease the tension they feel themselves so much (cope with their own nervousness) they might diffuse tension for the group’s sake which is a pretty valuable and charismatic thing to do.

I can totally see my one high value friend doing this who loves to bring up the vibe and closeness of the group dynamic. Whether it’s holding great eye contact with everyone with a big genuine smile or laughing that hearty physical laugh Tom does in the video.

It’s a good point because I think people get the impression that high value people are exclusive in their behaviors, keeping people they deem lower value at an arms length. While I think it may be true sometimes and for some people, the more charismatic thing to do is elevate the group dynamic and help bring others up to your level.

Laughing can be a way to do that, building up people’s confidence and building rapport which then allows for smoother socializing.

 

[Searcher]

I have seen some PUA's advice to not laugh or smile as it will make you look less dominant.

They even suggest everyone to keep a poker face in all interactions regardless of the situation. (Makes you look like the most powerful member of the group and makes girls chase).

What are your thoughts about this?

 

[topcat]

I have seen some PUA's advice to not laugh or smile as it will make you look less dominant.

They even suggest everyone to keep a poker face in all interactions regardless of the situation. (Makes you look like the most powerful member of the group and makes girls chase).

What are your thoughts about this?

Supplication. The only word that comes to mind when I consider suppressing genuine laughter, in order to appease women..

Doesn’t sound very dominant to me..

 

[StrayDog]

They even suggest everyone to keep a poker face in all interactions regardless of the situation. (Makes you look like the most powerful member of the group and makes girls chase).

What a terrible strategy for connecting with people. Who wants to hang out with someone who is a blank slate all the time and you never know where you stand with them? All cards on the table, heart on your sleeve is equally bad of a strategy but come on. People aren't robots

 

[Will_V]

I’ve time and time again noticed that when a dude I see as really cool and high status really lets himself go with a laugh, his “aura” of charisma seems to deflate a decent amount.


This isn’t just me either, the people who laugh the least - at least in my experience - tend to be respected a decent amount more as long as they’re sufficiently social / charismatic otherwise (The people who dont laugh and arent social tend to be avoided / talked about negatively). This seems quite important as it can make or break peoples perceptions, and can kill your interactions with girls.


I tend to laugh a lot (sometimes awkwardly) and also really let myself go with it. However, I’ve also noticed on those great days when I’m coming across as super magnetic and high status, I tend not to laugh as much as well even if everyone around me is letting themselves go with a laugh.


Do cool people just not laugh as much? What’s the nuance?

I've noticed that, it seems to really be a question of what the laughter represents.

Sometimes a guy has been acting very cool and collected, and then suddenly lets out a nervous laugh, and it reveals what he was really feeling. Or sometimes he makes a joke and finds the tension unbearable, which comes across as a bit weak.

Personally I don't laugh a lot, and when I do it's more like a chuckle or a belly laugh. I can't really say why, but introspection and curiosity seems to make laughter rarer and smiles more common, in my experience.

I think the best way to put it is that a laugh that represents genuine outward expression of delight comes across as engaging, whereas laughter that represents someone whose tension was 'tripped' defuses even the good kind of tension that one has with the people around them.

 

[Kaida]

However, if it is really, really ridiculous, and some ridiculous laughter is called for to defuse the awkward ludicrousness, then I will be doing the animated laughing thing as well, both to chill the guy being absurd out and to signal to everyone else there it is okay to laugh at this guy's silly stuff he is doing for laughs.

This ties in with the Law Of Least Effort too, because if a guy is being super ridiculous (very high effort) and not a single person laughs (zero results), he looks lame as hell and now the situation is awkward.

But by laughing hard and encouraging others to laugh as well, you’re technically giving him results for his efforts, helping him save face in the process, and saving the group from an awkward moment. Therefore balancing the equation.


I feel like some people understand this but overdo the balancing (like me in recent past). That manifests as laughing at unfunny jokes and reacting to things that don’t need a reaction, just so that one person doesn’t lose face. But now the person laughing is a “laugh slut” if they do it when its unnecessary, and now people value their reactions less.

Instead, they should only do these things in extreme situations where the entire group would benefit. Else just change the subject before it gets too awkward

Is my read right?

 

[Terms]

Its possible you're picking up on a lower level of emotional reactivity in general, which tends to be a high value trait (exceptions of course). "Emotional intentionality" rather than "emotional reactivity."

 

[Terms]

I have seen some PUA's advice to not laugh or smile as it will make you look less dominant.

They even suggest everyone to keep a poker face in all interactions regardless of the situation. (Makes you look like the most powerful member of the group and makes girls chase).

What are your thoughts about this?

To unlearn bad habits, it often takes over-correcting in the other direction as a temporary exercise. So material helping newbies find their way to a new baseline is different from what's actually optimal. You have to understand the intent and purpose behind the advice, and who its for. This can definitely be confusing in a disorganized system of learning, like random people randomly posting advice without context clarification.

 

[StrayDog]

Who's the most charismatic guy in this video?

Look at how Cruise is laughing though. He does it in a way that draws all the attention to him (it's a very physical laugh), comments on the performance (approving of it), and makes eye contact with those around them as if to say "Go ahead and laugh, it's funny."

It's kind of a goofy situation, and Seth MacFarlane is really making himself look like a bit of a goof here... actually I have a video I shot for GirlsChase.TV (not uploaded yet) on pattern interrupts where I have a Kermit prop, and wanted to do a little fun Kermit voice at the end... I'm pretty good at impressions... but it was just too goofy me doing that and I didn't include it.

Anyway, another thing Cruise is doing by laughing so much here is defusing the awkwardness of MacFarlane doing a Kermit impression like some clown in the chair. If Cruise just sat there smiling and nodding... well, it's not quite enough to defuse that awkwardness. So Cruise laughs ridiculously at the ludicrousness of the impression.

@Hector Papi Castillo is someone who laughs a lot and laughs exactly this way, very physically moving his body around, laughing in a high status / energetic dude way.

Not every high status guy will laugh this way, or as frequently. You can also do small smiles acknowledging the humor if it's only a little bit funny to you. That's more for the "high status collected guy."

I usually just do a smile or a small laugh. There's not much that really gets me laughing hard.

However, if it is really, really ridiculous, and some ridiculous laughter is called for to defuse the awkward ludicrousness, then I will be doing the animated laughing thing as well, both to chill the guy being absurd out and to signal to everyone else there it is okay to laugh at this guy's silly stuff he is doing for laughs.

Chase

This post just did me a solid, and I can confirm that it is a solid tactic. Last night I was hanging out with this gal I've been hooking up with. We had just fucked for a couple of hours and she was going to make me dinner (what a champ). We decided to throw a movie on in the background. She just moved into her new spot and didn't have Wi-Fi yet so a few old DVDs were the only options we had. The movie we both could agree on was hella scratched so we landed on a movie that she swore by but I was skeptical of. The cat in the hat. Man, that movie is dumb. I can get down on a solid kids movie, but my god what a train wreck. She loves it though. Like really loves it, she was quoting it and everything. Seeing as the power dynamic is already skewed towards me a good deal I felt a responsibility to handle this moment with a bit of savvy. I could tell that she was a bit self conscious of herself. Like wanting to laugh but holding back. Being hyper-aware of how I was responding to the situation. I was just kind of sitting there quietly. I probably could have just been like "I am not feeling this, we're watching something else" (there were no other better options) but that felt like a power move I didn't want to play. After all, watching some movie hanging out after sex isn't some crucial moment to flex power. I wanted her to just feel comfortable being herself even if it was not exactly in line with my humor or taste. So I found a couple of good reasons to laugh (genuinely). One: there were some moments in the movie so dumb and over the top, I could laugh at how ridiculous they were. Two: (this was the crucial reason) I found the fact that she was so into it very endearing. So I started laughing just because she was enjoying herself. But I didn't just laugh, I laughed big (like Tom Cruise in the video). I pulled her closer to me and told her "I just appreciate how much you appreciate it." So even though we were laughing about different things, we were both laughing together. She now had license to be herself. Her energy shifted and she just let herself go. It diffused a tension that was not necessary for the moment and created a feeling of togetherness. Soon after we finished dinner we started getting frisky again and I seized the opportunity to put the movie to rest. She was like "that's not your kink, cat in the hat during sex?" I was like "actually that's exactly my kink" and started being a goofball making over-the-top doctor seauss-style rhyme about her going down on me. We had one last good laugh and then went to town.

 

[Chase]

@Kaiderman,

This ties in with the Law Of Least Effort too, because if a guy is being super ridiculous (very high effort) and not a single person laughs (zero results), he looks lame as hell and now the situation is awkward.

But by laughing hard and encouraging others to laugh as well, you’re technically giving him results for his efforts, helping him save face in the process, and saving the group from an awkward moment. Therefore balancing the equation.


I feel like some people understand this but overdo the balancing (like me in recent past). That manifests as laughing at unfunny jokes and reacting to things that don’t need a reaction, just so that one person doesn’t lose face. But now the person laughing is a “laugh slut” if they do it when its unnecessary, and now people value their reactions less.

Instead, they should only do these things in extreme situations where the entire group would benefit. Else just change the subject before it gets too awkward

Is my read right?

Your read is on point.

You are going to do a bunch of awkward things while trying to update your social skills. That is normal.

You have your standard behavior... then you have where you are trying to get to. You may have the model for that in your head, but actually applying it to real world situations means trying to figure out which situations it's appropriate to apply it to, then how much to apply it, and so on, and all that calibration you are going to tend to screw up at first.

Those mistakes get you important lessons though, and those lessons are what you eventually build smooth calibration out of.

Chase

 

[Kaida]

A recent interaction reminded me of this topic

Today I was at the lunch table with my friends and we were just having a high energy conversation with everybody busting each others balls for fun and it went to anime:
——————————

(Group Conversation)

Friend 1: Yeah anime is cool

Me: Yuh I agree

Friend 2: Nah that shit is lame

Friend 3: (Turning body from other conversation and joining) Yeah it can be lame at times not gonna lie

F 1: Hell nah bro you just havent found the right one.

F 3: Well its not lame really theres just a lot of lame niggas who watch anime.

F 1: Yeah true

F 3: Kaiderman do you watch anime?

Me: Yeah

F 3: Perfect example.

Everyone Laughs or says “DAMNN”

Me: Hell nah (while laughing as well)

Conversation continues

————- - -

Our friend group teases each other a shit ton like this all the time (In fact I was actually going back and forth with a friend a few seconds before this) so its not like he was singling me out or tooling me. I tried to think of a comeback too but couldnt think of one.

Personally, I was not offended at all. Maybe it was his delivery or something, but it was very funny to me. I was about to laugh a lot harder until I remembered something I read - I think @Chase wrote it - that said not to laugh too much at yourself, so I suppressed some of it. (I feel like I’m getting the nuances of that wrong though).

Edit: There’s also been some times where people have made a joke at my expense - and I actually found it funny and was about to laugh - but was unsure if they were tooling me so I didn’t know what to do. I don’t get offended by jokes like that too easily, but I wouldnt want my laughter to be perceived as nervous / speechless instead of genuine / carefree.

If something like this happens to y’all, what would you guys do?