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 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 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, 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, 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. 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 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 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 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 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 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 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 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,
visit our home planet, how stuff works dot com. And for more podcasts from my heart Radio, visit the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,