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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio, Hey

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Speaker 1: brain Stuff Lauren vogelbamb Here. Audiences around the world break

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Speaker 1: out an applause at the conclusion of a stage play

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Speaker 1: or a musical concert, or when their favored presidential candidate

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Speaker 1: steps up to the podium. Humans have been applauding in

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Speaker 1: approval since ancient times. The custom is mentioned in the

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Speaker 1: Old Testament, which depicts the Israelites clapping their hands and

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Speaker 1: shouting God save the King for a young heir to

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Speaker 1: the throne. But how does a group of people start applauding,

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Speaker 1: and what determines how many other people join in and

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Speaker 1: how long the accolades last. Those aren't easy questions to answer.

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Speaker 1: Applause isn't a subject that researchers have studied extensively, and

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Speaker 1: there seemed to be only a handful part in the

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Speaker 1: pun of studies in the scientific literature. As a paper

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Speaker 1: from two thousand three explains, One theory is that audience

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Speaker 1: applause is triggered by a few individuals who have a

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Speaker 1: lower threshold of embarrassment than the rest of the crowd.

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Speaker 1: These brave enthusiasts clapping lowers the embarrassment cost for others,

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Speaker 1: but whether they actually join in. The researchers concluded had

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Speaker 1: to do with whether the performance they had witnessed crossed

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Speaker 1: a threshold for impressiveness. That is, whether the massive people

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Speaker 1: was sufficiently pleased by what they had seen or heard.

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Speaker 1: They found that people's liking for a performance correlated to

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Speaker 1: how long the audience kept clapping. As the effort of

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Speaker 1: clapping began to exceed their enthusiasm, some individuals stopped clapping,

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Speaker 1: raising the embarrassment cost for the remainder and giving them

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Speaker 1: an incentive to stop. The researchers also found that large

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Speaker 1: audiences tended to applaud more predictably than smaller groups. We

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Speaker 1: spoke via email with paper co author Gary lupjon, An,

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Speaker 1: Associate professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin Madison.

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Speaker 1: He said, imagine that five percent of people applaud at everything.

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Speaker 1: A smaller audience has a larger probability of not having

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Speaker 1: any such person that would be a tough crowd. As

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Speaker 1: an audience grows larger, the probability converges to five. In

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Speaker 1: other words, two larger audiences are more likely to behave

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Speaker 1: more similarly to one another than two small audiences. For

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Speaker 1: the same reason that if you flip a coin one

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Speaker 1: hundred times, you're more likely to get closer to half

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Speaker 1: heads and half tails than if you flip a coin

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Speaker 1: ten times. More recently, as a study published in thirteen

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Speaker 1: in the Journal of the Royal Society details, University of

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Speaker 1: Leeds mathematician Richard P. Man and colleagues filmed groups of

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Speaker 1: between thirteen to twenty college students watching oral presentations. They

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Speaker 1: found that there was relatively little connection between how much

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Speaker 1: people liked what they saw and the duration of their ovation. Instead,

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Speaker 1: they discovered that applause was a sort of social contagion

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Speaker 1: that started with a single person in the audience, who

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Speaker 1: typically began clapping about two point one seconds after the

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Speaker 1: speaker finished. The clapping then spread rapidly through the groups

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Speaker 1: over the next two point nine three seconds. At five

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Speaker 1: point five six seconds, the first applaud are typically stopped,

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Speaker 1: and by two points six seconds later, on average, the

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Speaker 1: rest of the audience was no longer putting their hands

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Speaker 1: together as well. The researchers also came to another surprising conclusion.

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Speaker 1: It wasn't physical proximity to another person clapping that triggered applause. Instead,

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Speaker 1: as Man explained in a national public radio interview, it

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Speaker 1: was the loudness of the applause that got audience members

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Speaker 1: to join in. He said, as soon as people can

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Speaker 1: hear that other people in the audience are clapping, they

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Speaker 1: begin to clap themselves. So often you are feeling social

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Speaker 1: pressure from audience members. You couldn't directly see. As you've

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Speaker 1: probably noticed, long ovations tend to vary in the speed

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Speaker 1: of clapping and go up and down in loudness, and

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Speaker 1: at times the audience may seem to be clapping in unison.

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Speaker 1: In a study published in the journal Nature in the

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Speaker 1: year two thousand, Romanian researchers recorded applause from theater and

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Speaker 1: opera performances by placing a microphone on the ceiling of

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Speaker 1: the hall. They discovered the people who were plotting often

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Speaker 1: started out clapping rapidly and chaotically, but after a few

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Speaker 1: seconds their claps began to slow and synchronize into a

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Speaker 1: distinctive rhythm, which added to the intensity of the noise.

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Speaker 1: The urge to synchronize the claps, they noted, seemed quote

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Speaker 1: to reflect the desire of the audience to express its

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Speaker 1: enthusiasm by increasing the average noise intensity Paradoxically, though, as

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Speaker 1: people strive to make an even louder ovation to show

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Speaker 1: their enthusiasm, they begin to clap more rapidly. That tends

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Speaker 1: to disperse their clapping and destroy the cumulative synchronization. It's

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Speaker 1: only when they slow their claps that the applause becomes

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Speaker 1: thunderous again. Today's episode was written by Patrick J. Tiger

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Speaker 1: and produced by Tyler. Playing brain Stuff is a production

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Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more in

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Speaker 1: this and lots of other applause worthy topics we hope,

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Speaker 1: visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com. And

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Speaker 1: favorite shows,