  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.
