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"A smaller audience has a larger probability of not having any such person - that would be a tough crowd." "Imagine that five percent of people applaud at everything," says Lupjan. The researchers also found that large audiences tended to applaud more predictably than smaller groups.
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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. They found that people's liking for a performance correlated to how long the audience kept clapping. "Whatever one's threshold is, their 'embarassment' is reduced as others around them start clapping," co-author Gary Lupyan, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, says via email.īut whether they actually join in, the researchers concluded, had to do with whether the performance they'd witnessed crossed a threshold for "impressiveness" - that is, whether the mass of people was sufficiently pleased by what they'd seen or heard. These brave enthusiasts' clapping lowers the "embarrassment cost" for others. "There was relatively little connection between how much people liked what they saw and the duration of their ovation."Īs one 2003 scientific paper 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.