Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio, Hey
Speaker 1: brain Stuff Lauren vogelbamb Here. Audiences around the world break
Speaker 1: out an applause at the conclusion of a stage play
Speaker 1: or a musical concert, or when their favored presidential candidate
Speaker 1: steps up to the podium. Humans have been applauding in
Speaker 1: approval since ancient times. The custom is mentioned in the
Speaker 1: Old Testament, which depicts the Israelites clapping their hands and
Speaker 1: shouting God save the King for a young heir to
Speaker 1: the throne. But how does a group of people start applauding,
Speaker 1: and what determines how many other people join in and
Speaker 1: how long the accolades last. Those aren't easy questions to answer.
Speaker 1: Applause isn't a subject that researchers have studied extensively, and
Speaker 1: there seemed to be only a handful part in the
Speaker 1: pun of studies in the scientific literature. As a paper
Speaker 1: from two thousand three explains, One theory is that audience
Speaker 1: applause is triggered by a few individuals who have a
Speaker 1: lower threshold of embarrassment than the rest of the crowd.
Speaker 1: These brave enthusiasts clapping lowers the embarrassment cost for others,
Speaker 1: but whether they actually join in. The researchers concluded had
Speaker 1: to do with whether the performance they had witnessed crossed
Speaker 1: a threshold for impressiveness. That is, whether the massive people
Speaker 1: was sufficiently pleased by what they had seen or heard.
Speaker 1: They found that people's liking for a performance correlated to
Speaker 1: how long the audience kept clapping. As the effort of
Speaker 1: clapping began to exceed their enthusiasm, some individuals stopped clapping,
Speaker 1: raising the embarrassment cost for the remainder and giving them
Speaker 1: an incentive to stop. The researchers also found that large
Speaker 1: audiences tended to applaud more predictably than smaller groups. We
Speaker 1: spoke via email with paper co author Gary lupjon, An,
Speaker 1: Associate professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
Speaker 1: He said, imagine that five percent of people applaud at everything.
Speaker 1: A smaller audience has a larger probability of not having
Speaker 1: any such person that would be a tough crowd. As
Speaker 1: an audience grows larger, the probability converges to five. In
Speaker 1: other words, two larger audiences are more likely to behave
Speaker 1: more similarly to one another than two small audiences. For
Speaker 1: the same reason that if you flip a coin one
Speaker 1: hundred times, you're more likely to get closer to half
Speaker 1: heads and half tails than if you flip a coin
Speaker 1: ten times. More recently, as a study published in thirteen
Speaker 1: in the Journal of the Royal Society details, University of
Speaker 1: Leeds mathematician Richard P. Man and colleagues filmed groups of
Speaker 1: between thirteen to twenty college students watching oral presentations. They
Speaker 1: found that there was relatively little connection between how much
Speaker 1: people liked what they saw and the duration of their ovation. Instead,
Speaker 1: they discovered that applause was a sort of social contagion
Speaker 1: that started with a single person in the audience, who
Speaker 1: typically began clapping about two point one seconds after the
Speaker 1: speaker finished. The clapping then spread rapidly through the groups
Speaker 1: over the next two point nine three seconds. At five
Speaker 1: point five six seconds, the first applaud are typically stopped,
Speaker 1: and by two points six seconds later, on average, the
Speaker 1: rest of the audience was no longer putting their hands
Speaker 1: together as well. The researchers also came to another surprising conclusion.
Speaker 1: It wasn't physical proximity to another person clapping that triggered applause. Instead,
Speaker 1: as Man explained in a national public radio interview, it
Speaker 1: was the loudness of the applause that got audience members
Speaker 1: to join in. He said, as soon as people can
Speaker 1: hear that other people in the audience are clapping, they
Speaker 1: begin to clap themselves. So often you are feeling social
Speaker 1: pressure from audience members. You couldn't directly see. As you've
Speaker 1: probably noticed, long ovations tend to vary in the speed
Speaker 1: of clapping and go up and down in loudness, and
Speaker 1: at times the audience may seem to be clapping in unison.
Speaker 1: In a study published in the journal Nature in the
Speaker 1: year two thousand, Romanian researchers recorded applause from theater and
Speaker 1: opera performances by placing a microphone on the ceiling of
Speaker 1: the hall. They discovered the people who were plotting often
Speaker 1: started out clapping rapidly and chaotically, but after a few
Speaker 1: seconds their claps began to slow and synchronize into a
Speaker 1: distinctive rhythm, which added to the intensity of the noise.
Speaker 1: The urge to synchronize the claps, they noted, seemed quote
Speaker 1: to reflect the desire of the audience to express its
Speaker 1: enthusiasm by increasing the average noise intensity Paradoxically, though, as
Speaker 1: people strive to make an even louder ovation to show
Speaker 1: their enthusiasm, they begin to clap more rapidly. That tends
Speaker 1: to disperse their clapping and destroy the cumulative synchronization. It's
Speaker 1: only when they slow their claps that the applause becomes
Speaker 1: thunderous again. Today's episode was written by Patrick J. Tiger
Speaker 1: and produced by Tyler. Playing brain Stuff is a production
Speaker 1: of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more in
Speaker 1: this and lots of other applause worthy topics we hope,
Speaker 1: visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com. And
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Speaker 1: favorite shows,