WEBVTT - What's the Science Behind Applause? 0:00:01.920 --> 0:00:06.440 Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio, Hey 0:00:06.519 --> 0:00:11.000 brain Stuff Lauren vogelbamb Here. Audiences around the world break 0:00:11.000 --> 0:00:13.400 out an applause at the conclusion of a stage play 0:00:13.520 --> 0:00:16.560 or a musical concert, or when their favored presidential candidate 0:00:16.560 --> 0:00:19.599 steps up to the podium. Humans have been applauding in 0:00:19.680 --> 0:00:23.239 approval since ancient times. The custom is mentioned in the 0:00:23.280 --> 0:00:26.319 Old Testament, which depicts the Israelites clapping their hands and 0:00:26.320 --> 0:00:28.520 shouting God save the King for a young heir to 0:00:28.560 --> 0:00:32.680 the throne. But how does a group of people start applauding, 0:00:32.960 --> 0:00:35.279 and what determines how many other people join in and 0:00:35.320 --> 0:00:40.080 how long the accolades last. Those aren't easy questions to answer. 0:00:40.400 --> 0:00:43.960 Applause isn't a subject that researchers have studied extensively, and 0:00:44.000 --> 0:00:46.159 there seemed to be only a handful part in the 0:00:46.200 --> 0:00:50.440 pun of studies in the scientific literature. As a paper 0:00:50.479 --> 0:00:53.720 from two thousand three explains, One theory is that audience 0:00:53.760 --> 0:00:56.560 applause is triggered by a few individuals who have a 0:00:56.600 --> 0:00:59.640 lower threshold of embarrassment than the rest of the crowd. 0:01:00.520 --> 0:01:05.560 These brave enthusiasts clapping lowers the embarrassment cost for others, 0:01:05.560 --> 0:01:08.800 but whether they actually join in. The researchers concluded had 0:01:08.840 --> 0:01:11.120 to do with whether the performance they had witnessed crossed 0:01:11.160 --> 0:01:15.080 a threshold for impressiveness. That is, whether the massive people 0:01:15.200 --> 0:01:17.680 was sufficiently pleased by what they had seen or heard. 0:01:18.240 --> 0:01:21.160 They found that people's liking for a performance correlated to 0:01:21.240 --> 0:01:24.760 how long the audience kept clapping. As the effort of 0:01:24.760 --> 0:01:28.840 clapping began to exceed their enthusiasm, some individuals stopped clapping, 0:01:29.240 --> 0:01:32.039 raising the embarrassment cost for the remainder and giving them 0:01:32.080 --> 0:01:36.560 an incentive to stop. The researchers also found that large 0:01:36.600 --> 0:01:41.360 audiences tended to applaud more predictably than smaller groups. We 0:01:41.600 --> 0:01:44.840 spoke via email with paper co author Gary lupjon, An, 0:01:44.840 --> 0:01:48.360 Associate professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin Madison. 0:01:49.200 --> 0:01:52.720 He said, imagine that five percent of people applaud at everything. 0:01:53.160 --> 0:01:56.400 A smaller audience has a larger probability of not having 0:01:56.440 --> 0:01:59.800 any such person that would be a tough crowd. As 0:01:59.800 --> 0:02:03.920 an audience grows larger, the probability converges to five. In 0:02:03.960 --> 0:02:06.920 other words, two larger audiences are more likely to behave 0:02:06.960 --> 0:02:10.400 more similarly to one another than two small audiences. For 0:02:10.440 --> 0:02:12.160 the same reason that if you flip a coin one 0:02:12.240 --> 0:02:14.880 hundred times, you're more likely to get closer to half 0:02:14.919 --> 0:02:17.080 heads and half tails than if you flip a coin 0:02:17.240 --> 0:02:21.640 ten times. More recently, as a study published in thirteen 0:02:21.680 --> 0:02:24.880 in the Journal of the Royal Society details, University of 0:02:24.960 --> 0:02:28.760 Leeds mathematician Richard P. Man and colleagues filmed groups of 0:02:28.760 --> 0:02:33.440 between thirteen to twenty college students watching oral presentations. They 0:02:33.480 --> 0:02:36.119 found that there was relatively little connection between how much 0:02:36.120 --> 0:02:41.079 people liked what they saw and the duration of their ovation. Instead, 0:02:41.440 --> 0:02:44.320 they discovered that applause was a sort of social contagion 0:02:44.440 --> 0:02:46.840 that started with a single person in the audience, who 0:02:46.880 --> 0:02:50.080 typically began clapping about two point one seconds after the 0:02:50.120 --> 0:02:53.680 speaker finished. The clapping then spread rapidly through the groups 0:02:53.680 --> 0:02:56.920 over the next two point nine three seconds. At five 0:02:56.960 --> 0:02:59.880 point five six seconds, the first applaud are typically stopped, 0:03:00.200 --> 0:03:02.960 and by two points six seconds later, on average, the 0:03:03.000 --> 0:03:05.080 rest of the audience was no longer putting their hands 0:03:05.120 --> 0:03:10.400 together as well. The researchers also came to another surprising conclusion. 0:03:10.960 --> 0:03:15.880 It wasn't physical proximity to another person clapping that triggered applause. Instead, 0:03:16.120 --> 0:03:19.160 as Man explained in a national public radio interview, it 0:03:19.280 --> 0:03:21.799 was the loudness of the applause that got audience members 0:03:21.800 --> 0:03:25.040 to join in. He said, as soon as people can 0:03:25.040 --> 0:03:27.480 hear that other people in the audience are clapping, they 0:03:27.520 --> 0:03:31.000 begin to clap themselves. So often you are feeling social 0:03:31.000 --> 0:03:35.080 pressure from audience members. You couldn't directly see. As you've 0:03:35.120 --> 0:03:38.280 probably noticed, long ovations tend to vary in the speed 0:03:38.320 --> 0:03:41.160 of clapping and go up and down in loudness, and 0:03:41.400 --> 0:03:44.440 at times the audience may seem to be clapping in unison. 0:03:45.200 --> 0:03:47.040 In a study published in the journal Nature in the 0:03:47.120 --> 0:03:51.000 year two thousand, Romanian researchers recorded applause from theater and 0:03:51.040 --> 0:03:53.760 opera performances by placing a microphone on the ceiling of 0:03:53.800 --> 0:03:57.160 the hall. They discovered the people who were plotting often 0:03:57.200 --> 0:04:00.960 started out clapping rapidly and chaotically, but after a few 0:04:00.960 --> 0:04:04.080 seconds their claps began to slow and synchronize into a 0:04:04.120 --> 0:04:07.200 distinctive rhythm, which added to the intensity of the noise. 0:04:07.960 --> 0:04:11.160 The urge to synchronize the claps, they noted, seemed quote 0:04:11.360 --> 0:04:13.880 to reflect the desire of the audience to express its 0:04:13.960 --> 0:04:20.120 enthusiasm by increasing the average noise intensity Paradoxically, though, as 0:04:20.160 --> 0:04:22.719 people strive to make an even louder ovation to show 0:04:22.720 --> 0:04:26.200 their enthusiasm, they begin to clap more rapidly. That tends 0:04:26.240 --> 0:04:30.479 to disperse their clapping and destroy the cumulative synchronization. It's 0:04:30.480 --> 0:04:32.960 only when they slow their claps that the applause becomes 0:04:32.960 --> 0:04:41.240 thunderous again. Today's episode was written by Patrick J. Tiger 0:04:41.279 --> 0:04:43.960 and produced by Tyler. Playing brain Stuff is a production 0:04:43.960 --> 0:04:46.120 of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more in 0:04:46.200 --> 0:04:48.599 this and lots of other applause worthy topics we hope, 0:04:48.800 --> 0:04:51.400 visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com. And 0:04:51.520 --> 0:04:53.719 for more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeart 0:04:53.760 --> 0:04:56.279 Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your 0:04:56.320 --> 0:04:56.960 favorite shows,