Since we are not conscious of our state of unconsciousness, we vastly overestimate the amount of time that we are aware of our actions, whatever their cause.

When people were asked to explain why they laughed in a particular situation, they would concoct some reasonable fiction about the cause of their behavior ("She did something funny," "It was something she said," "I wanted to put her at ease"). Observations of social context showed that such explanations were usually wrong. In clinical settings, such post–hoc misattributions would be termed "confabulations"—honest but flawed attempts to explain one's actions.

Subjects also incorrectly presumed that laughing is a choice and under conscious control—a reason for their confident, if bogus, explanations of their behavior. But laughing is not a matter of uttering "Ha–Ha," as we would choose a word in speech. When challenged to laugh on command, most subjects could not do so. In certain, usually playful social contexts, laughter simply happens. However, this lack of voluntary control does not preclude an orderly, predictable pattern of behavior. Laughter appears at those places where punctuation would appear in the structure of speech. We may say, "I have to go now—ha–ha" but rarely "I have to&mdashlha–ha—go now." This punctuation effect is highly reliable and requires the coordination of laughing with the linguistic structure of speech, yet it is performed without the conscious awareness of the speaker.

— Robert R. Provine