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?
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Slightly off topic, but just out of curiousity. Has anyone ever asked a co-worker male or female in a professional environment, to actually explain something to them like they’re 5?
At a certain point, people’s arms and hands get tired, and mentally they also think, “This applause has gone on long enough.” Even if others don’t stop, they will stop.
I teach my students that polite applause is 8 claps long.
The length of total applause depends on how many people are enthusiastic and how many are giving whatever they perceive to be the bare minimum.
Applause is over when enough people drop out that continued clapping is awkward.
I figure it’s like this:
Some fraction of people always clap briefly. They’re doing it as a ritual, they wouldn’t really clap longer or shorter if the thing was good/bad, they just routinely clap for 3-4 seconds because that’s what you’re supposed to do.
Some fraction of people clap until they notice the noise is starting to die down, and then they stop, that might be when that first fraction has stopped, but it might go on longer if all the rest of the audience is still clapping hard and the fact that the first fraction has stopped clapping is not really noticeable.
Some fraction of people clap on their own schedule, and don’t take much notice of the rest of the audience. They clap as long as they feel is appropriate, whether that’s very brief, or an extended ovation (they notice the rest of the audience a little, but their length of clapping is mostly self-determined). Most people have pretty good instincts about this and won’t go on for like a ridiculous amount of time, and whenever you get that awkward situation where all but one or two people have stopped clapping, those last few can usually be shamed into stopping with a look of disapproval from their neighbors.
Obviously this is all a very rough form of crowd intelligence, which is why applause usually doesn’t just stop suddenly on a dime, but gradually fades away over the course of a couple seconds. Different people notice at different times that its time to stop, that the applause is over. Some people notice early, some notice later. And you’ve probably encountered that funny situation where it *appeared* like the applause was about to end but then suddenly it picked back up again. That’s a situation where a bunch of people misread the signals, or were indecisive and changed their minds.
There are a lot of people in any given audience that do not want to clap for too long because it gets cringey. As soon as they hear it waning down, they are happy to stop in unison relatively quickly. Then there is a smaller group of ppl who even when it starts winding down, they ramp it up to keep it going and the ones who just momentarily stopped now have to resume or llook awkward. True thought that that goes through their head “Jesus fucking Christ on a pogo stick, shut the fuck up”. This does not apply to the end of a concert that everyone enjoyed. My beef is particular ppl who feel they need to take it in their hands (literally) to keep it going. The thought that goes through their head “these people don’t know any better. This deserves more cowbell”
Every individual still makes their own decisions, one person stops, another stops somewhere else, until just a few are left, they can hear it and also stop, but yeah I think everyone is right, there’s just lots of factors
Depends on where you are. At military events the rule we are usually given when clapping while in a formation is that you all stop clapping when the highest ranking person stops.
If you want to stop an applause you first need to take a lead (works even with audiences with 200+ people) and then just change the tempo to be more slow, progressively dying out.
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)
When one person claps, they wake up the Clapping Monster, who compels everyone else to clap. When the Clapping Monster falls asleep again, people just kinda lose interest. It’s a really sleepy monster.
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