Katharina Buczek
Have you ever attended a play or musical and felt prompted to join in with the crowd’s applause after an act ended?
The practice of clapping as a sign of approval has been around since ancient times. In fact, the custom is even cited in the Old Testament.
While applauding is commonplace for most entertainment events, though, have you ever wondered how a group of strangers actually begin applauding? Moreover, what factors determine how many people join in on the clapping, and just how long will the show of approval last?
These questions, although common, are not very easy to answer– especially because the phenomenon has not been extensively studied.
Still, in a scientific paper published in 2003, one theory holds that a few individuals who have lower thresholds of embarrassment actually trigger applause that ripples throughout the rest of the audience.
In other words, once these individuals start to clap, it helps decrease the embarrassment felt by other attendees– who eventually join in with the applause.
“Whatever one’s threshold is, their ’embarrassment’ is reduced as others around them start clapping,” said Gary Lupyan, the study’s co-author.
But interestingly, the researchers determined whether or not the other audience members also clapped actually had nothing to do with the “impressiveness” of a performance.
Instead, it was found that the length of time an audience kept clapping did correlate to an audience’s approval of a performance.
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