You Can Tell How Emotionally Intelligent Someone Is Just By How They Laugh, According To NASA
The best astronauts? Turns out they're "personality hires."
Anastasiia Lopushynska | Pexels The term "personality hire" gets thrown around a lot these days, usually as a derisive way to undermine someone's accomplishments. But it turns out hiring based on personality might be more effective than we think. So much so that even NASA has done it.
And after focusing on personality profiles in choosing astronauts, they discovered an interesting link between skills and something most of us never think much about: our laughs. Turns out, a person's laugh is directly linked to their level of emotional intelligence.
A person's laugh can reveal their level of emotional intelligence, according to NASA.
NASA's discoveries about laughter were chronicled in journalist Charles Duhigg's book "Supercommunicators: How to Unlock the Secret Language of Connection," which digs into how communication skills impact every aspect of our lives.
In the book, Duhigg described an interesting finding at NASA in the 1980s. Their astronauts were frequently becoming depressed and even getting into arguments with each other. As the International Space Station project commenced, this presented a major problem. They'd be up there for six months at a time. Getting tetchy was emphatically NOT gonna work.
Suddenly, it became imperative to find astronauts who were not just physically fit and, you know, literal rocket scientists, but also had the kinds of personalities that could endure challenging interpersonal relations under even more challenging conditions. So they started combing through interview tapes of successful astronauts, and a pattern quickly emerged.
NASA found that astronauts who matched the interviewer's laugh had the highest emotional intelligence.
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We've all been in a situation where we're laughing our heads off, and everyone else around us just sort of chuckles. Or vice versa: someone else is really cutting up, and we're just not really getting it.
Sure, sometimes it's a matter of subjective taste, but there's also a psychology to this. People with higher emotional intelligence tend to mirror each other's laughter. It's like another common scenario: The thing being laughed at isn't particularly funny, but the person laughing at it is laughing so hard that THAT becomes funny, so we laugh along anyway. That's a form of this emotional mirroring.
And when NASA delved into the interview tapes of their candidate astronauts and measured them against their success metrics, a clear pattern emerged. Those who matched their interviewer's level of laughter tended to perform best once on the job, in part because they were better able to connect with their fellow astronauts and weather the incredibly stressful scenarios they encountered together.
NASA is still using 'personality hire' testing to this day as it plans to attempt a mission to Mars.
The mission to Mars has one key problem. Plenty of people have been to space (even Katy Perry has, for God's sake), but nobody's ever been to Mars. Plus, the stakes are orders of magnitude higher. The ISS is the size of a four-story house and hovers in orbit with the Earth constantly in sight, but Mars is literally millions of miles away, and the mission will require YEARS in tiny, cramped capsules.
If you're anything like me, you are having an actual panic attack just thinking about it, which means you are the dead-wrong person for the job, and everyone would die if you got hired (that could be me projecting my own anxieties, but still). In short, finding exactly the right people for this job is essential!
As they did in the '80s, NASA is using emotional intelligence and personality as one of the top criteria. Using the Big 5 Personality Model, they are evaluating astronauts based on key personality traits that suggest they'll not only be able to endure this horror show–er, mission without losing their minds, but also do so without causing anyone else to lose theirs.
Traits like extraversion, agreeableness, and good coping skills are key. But, like 40 years ago, so is a sense of humor. NASA's scientists found that a sense of humor and the ability to both make and take jokes were essential to "crew compatibility, conflict resolution, and coping" and "quickly [defusing] any problems."
So the next time that annoying co-worker shrugs you off as just a personality hire, let them know that even people being sent to Mars are being judged for how good a hang they are, and your colleague probably wouldn't make the cut!
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
