Sophie Scott

Sophie Scott, CBE, Director of the Institute for Cognitive Neuroscience at University College London and a leading researcher on the neurobiology of human vocal communication, examines the deepening crisis of public trust in science amid rising individualism that renders group-level biological findings increasingly unpalatable. She argues that science has always unsettled people by revealing unwelcome truths, yet the exponential growth of research has strained peer review to breaking point, making it harder to secure rigorous evaluation and prompting the recent practice of paying reviewers. Scott notes that social media has empowered non-experts to demand absolute certainty while treating themselves as authorities, a stance fundamentally at odds with science as a provisional, self-correcting process that is always unfinished. Drawing a parallel with religion, she observes humanity’s enduring need for clear boundaries and authoritative answers when traditional sources of meaning recede. Against this backdrop Scott explores her own research on laughter, treating it as an ancient play signal found across species, a low-cost mechanism for rapid social bonding and group cohesion, and a behaviour whose contagious quality marks in-group status. She examines how children slowly acquire the complex social rules distinguishing laughter that includes from laughter that ridicules, how laughter can erupt in moments of extreme stress or shock as an attempt to reframe threat as play, and why the historically ambiguous figure of the jester or trickster makes comedy a perennial lightning rod for offense. In the current climate, she suggests, the targeting of humour reflects both the amplification of individual grievance through social media and a renewed willingness to police voices, particularly women’s, that refuse to conform.