Laughter and effective presidential leadership: A case study of Ronald Reagan as the ‘great communicator'

Abstract

President Ronald Reagan’s expert use of media and his charismatic connection with viewers earned him the moniker “the great communicator”. This study examines one aspect of his charisma, the influence of elicited laughter, during a much-discussed and highly critical 5-minute news story by CBS reporter Leslie Stahl during the 1984 US presidential election. Production choices regarding observable audience responses (OAR) on viewer perceptions of politicians have not been extensively studied. The focus of the present study is to explore the effects of audience laughter on perceived leadership traits. Two experiments examining the mediating effects of audience laughter on perceptions of presidential leadership are reported. The first shows that perceptions of Reagan’s perceived warmth significantly diminish when strong laughter is removed from the presentation, whereas perceptions of competence remain unaffected. The second study proposes a between-subjects experiment (preregistered report) to confirm and extend the findings of the first study by considering trait charisma and the influence of specific humorous comments that are accompanied by laughter.

Humor Can Increase Perceived Communicator Effectiveness Regardless of Race, Gender, and Expertise—If You are Funny Enough

“…Although generally perceived to be competent in their jobs, scientists are not the best communicators and score relatively poorly on perceptions of warmth and benevolence (Fiske & Dupree, 2014). There is some evidence that humor and laughter can increase the perceptions of communicator warmth without affecting perceived competence (Stewart et al, 2019) and generally have positive downstream effects on communicative outcomes (Cacciatore et al, 2020; Yeo, Anderson, et al, 2020; Yeo, Su, et al, 2020). Here, we conducted an experiment to examine how source characteristics, specifically race, gender, and credentials, affect perceived communicator effectiveness.…”