Professor Lucy O'Brien: What am I doing when I laugh at others?

Event details

Human beings are creatures of feeling that live in social relations with each other. I want to bring into view kinds of social acts that are aimed at inducing feeling in others. In this talk I will focus on acts of laughing at others missteps or failures, and consider how we should think about such acts. I will argue that many of our laughings at others are aimed at making others feel socially diminished, and will try better to understand how they can do that. However, I will also explore a number of other things we do when we laugh at another.