What's the Science Behind Applause?

The way that applause starts and moves through a large crowd is scientifically predictable. Learn what the research shows about the influence of sound and psychology in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio, Hey
brain Stuff Lauren vogelbamb Here. Audiences around the world break
out an applause at the conclusion of a stage play
or a musical concert, or when their favored presidential candidate
steps up to the podium. Humans have been applauding in
approval since ancient times. The custom is mentioned in the

(00:23):
Old Testament, which depicts the Israelites clapping their hands and
shouting God save the King for a young heir to
the throne. But how does a group of people start applauding,
and what determines how many other people join in and
how long the accolades last. Those aren't easy questions to answer.
Applause isn't a subject that researchers have studied extensively, and

(00:44):
there seemed to be only a handful part in the
pun of studies in the scientific literature. As a paper
from two thousand three explains, One theory is that audience
applause is triggered by a few individuals who have a
lower threshold of embarrassment than the rest of the crowd.
These brave enthusiasts clapping lowers the embarrassment cost for others,

(01:05):
but whether they actually join in. The researchers concluded had
to do with whether the performance they had witnessed crossed
a threshold for impressiveness. That is, whether the massive people
was sufficiently pleased by what they had seen or heard.
They found that people's liking for a performance correlated to
how long the audience kept clapping. As the effort of
clapping began to exceed their enthusiasm, some individuals stopped clapping,

(01:29):
raising the embarrassment cost for the remainder and giving them
an incentive to stop. The researchers also found that large
audiences tended to applaud more predictably than smaller groups. We
spoke via email with paper co author Gary lupjon, An,
Associate professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
He said, imagine that five percent of people applaud at everything.

(01:53):
A smaller audience has a larger probability of not having
any such person that would be a tough crowd. As
an audience grows larger, the probability converges to five. In
other words, two larger audiences are more likely to behave
more similarly to one another than two small audiences. For
the same reason that if you flip a coin one
hundred times, you're more likely to get closer to half

(02:14):
heads and half tails than if you flip a coin
ten times. More recently, as a study published in thirteen
in the Journal of the Royal Society details, University of
Leeds mathematician Richard P. Man and colleagues filmed groups of
between thirteen to twenty college students watching oral presentations. They
found that there was relatively little connection between how much

(02:36):
people liked what they saw and the duration of their ovation. Instead,
they discovered that applause was a sort of social contagion
that started with a single person in the audience, who
typically began clapping about two point one seconds after the
speaker finished. The clapping then spread rapidly through the groups
over the next two point nine three seconds. At five

(02:56):
point five six seconds, the first applaud are typically stopped,
and by two points six seconds later, on average, the
rest of the audience was no longer putting their hands
together as well. The researchers also came to another surprising conclusion.
It wasn't physical proximity to another person clapping that triggered applause. Instead,
as Man explained in a national public radio interview, it

(03:19):
was the loudness of the applause that got audience members
to join in. He said, as soon as people can
hear that other people in the audience are clapping, they
begin to clap themselves. So often you are feeling social
pressure from audience members. You couldn't directly see. As you've
probably noticed, long ovations tend to vary in the speed
of clapping and go up and down in loudness, and

(03:41):
at times the audience may seem to be clapping in unison.
In a study published in the journal Nature in the
year two thousand, Romanian researchers recorded applause from theater and
opera performances by placing a microphone on the ceiling of
the hall. They discovered the people who were plotting often
started out clapping rapidly and chaotically, but after a few
seconds their claps began to slow and synchronize into a

(04:04):
distinctive rhythm, which added to the intensity of the noise.
The urge to synchronize the claps, they noted, seemed quote
to reflect the desire of the audience to express its
enthusiasm by increasing the average noise intensity Paradoxically, though, as
people strive to make an even louder ovation to show
their enthusiasm, they begin to clap more rapidly. That tends

(04:26):
to disperse their clapping and destroy the cumulative synchronization. It's
only when they slow their claps that the applause becomes
thunderous again. Today's episode was written by Patrick J. Tiger
and produced by Tyler. Playing brain Stuff is a production
of I Heart Radio's How Stuff Works. For more in
this and lots of other applause worthy topics we hope,

(04:48):
visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com. And
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