How does an audience collectively decide the applause is over?

Question

I think most people figure they’ll clap until the applause dies down. But if everyone were to think like that we would clap forever. How does the audience hive mind, for lack of a better term, stop the applause?

In: Other

Answer 1

Here’s another interesting example of the same idea. An audience playing pong by holding up coloured paddles, where the percentage of the audience holding up a green paddle determines how high the team’s pong paddle is on the screen: [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9eVz4wBBgU](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-9eVz4wBBgU)