In 1933 Clarence Leuba, a professor of psychology at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, made his home the setting for an ambitious experiment. He planned to find out whether laughter is a learned response to being tickled or an innate one.
To achieve this goal, he determined never to allow his newborn son to associate laughter with tickling. This meant that no one - in particular, his wife - was allowed to laugh in the presence of the child while tickling or being tickled. Leuba planned to observe whether his son eventually laughed when tickled, or grew up dismissing wiggling fingers in his armpits with a stony silence.
Somehow Leuba got his wife to promise to cooperate, and so the Leuba household became a tickle-free zone, except during experimental sessions in which Leuba subjected R. L. Male, as he referred to his son in his research notes, to laughter-free tickling.
During these sessions, Leuba followed a strict procedure. First he donned a 30-centimetre by 40-centimetre cardboard mask, while as a further precaution maintaining a "smileless, sober expression" behind it. Then he tickled his son in a predetermined pattern - first light, then vigorous - in order of armpits, ribs, chin, neck, knees, then feet.
Everything went well until 23 April 1933, when Leuba recorded that his wife had made a confession. On one occasion, after her son's bath, she had "jounced him up and down while laughing and saying, 'Bouncy, Bouncy'.” R. L. Male was happily screaming with laughter when tickled.
Undeterred, Leuba repeated the experiment after his daughter, E. L. Female, was born in February 1936. He obtained the same result. By the age of 7 months, his daughter was laughing when tickled.
Leuba concluded that laughter must be an innate response to being tickled. However, one senses a hesitation in his conclusion, as if he felt that it all might have been different if only his wife had followed his rules more carefully.
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