The Freakonomics blog wonders why standing ovations are so common amongst opera audiences. Are "classical music and theater are being diminished by a...scarcity of negative feedback?" They ask. "What if theater and orchestra audiences behaved more like blog commenters?"An awful thought (just kidding! Love you guys!). Tyler Cowen thinks the answer is rich people who prize a studied aloofness. "The opera-going demographic wishes to signal 'magnanimity,'" writes Tyler. "When these high-status people are slighted, as they might be by a bad performance, their privately optimal response is to ignore the slight. Reacting to the slight suggests that they have let it bother them; it is a sign of low status to be bothered by what are ultimately low status entities."I favor a different hypothesis: People fear being wrong. The standing ovation isn't necessarily a sign of enjoyment. You might stand and clap for an utterly unpleasant play about the Holocaust. It's a sign of critical appreciation. And people don't want to be wrong about whether a play deserves an ovation. They don't want to be the boor who missed the cutting edge theory behind the endless monologues. Disliking a beautiful performance can be seen as a sign of poor taste or deficient critical faculties. As such it takes time to decide whether or not jeering is a safe response to a poor performance. Time you don't have because the audience has already taken a different path.Audience behavior, after all, is a herd phenomenon. Standing ovations are occasionally instantaneous. But they're more often infections. Some stand, and then some others stand, and then the laggards decide that remaining seated seems churlish, and they can't see anything anyway. So they stand too. Just about no one boos while everyone else stands and cheers.The question, I'd say, is why appreciation is a safer for the early adopters than approbation. Why do people fear being judged overly negative rather than overly positive? I'd guess it's because jeering can only mean one thing -- that you disliked the performance. Applause can also be polite. They worked hard, after all. Doesn't mean you loved the play. But polite applause becomes sustained applause, and then someone stands, and suddenly you've turned a tepid exercise of graciousness into a standing ovation. STANDING OVATIONS.
The Freakonomics blog wonders why standing ovations are so common amongst opera audiences. Are "classical music and theater are being diminished by a...scarcity of negative feedback?" They ask. "What if theater and orchestra audiences behaved more like blog commenters?"An awful thought (just kidding! Love you guys!). Tyler Cowen thinks the answer is rich people who prize a studied aloofness. "The opera-going demographic wishes to signal 'magnanimity,'" writes Tyler. "When these high-status people are slighted, as they might be by a bad performance, their privately optimal response is to ignore the slight. Reacting to the slight suggests that they have let it bother them; it is a sign of low status to be bothered by what are ultimately low status entities."I favor a different hypothesis: People fear being wrong. The standing ovation isn't necessarily a sign of enjoyment. You might stand and clap for an utterly unpleasant play about the Holocaust. It's a sign of critical appreciation. And people don't want to be wrong about whether a play deserves an ovation. They don't want to be the boor who missed the cutting edge theory behind the endless monologues. Disliking a beautiful performance can be seen as a sign of poor taste or deficient critical faculties. As such it takes time to decide whether or not jeering is a safe response to a poor performance. Time you don't have because the audience has already taken a different path.Audience behavior, after all, is a herd phenomenon. Standing ovations are occasionally instantaneous. But they're more often infections. Some stand, and then some others stand, and then the laggards decide that remaining seated seems churlish, and they can't see anything anyway. So they stand too. Just about no one boos while everyone else stands and cheers.The question, I'd say, is why appreciation is a safer for the early adopters than approbation. Why do people fear being judged overly negative rather than overly positive? I'd guess it's because jeering can only mean one thing -- that you disliked the performance. Applause can also be polite. They worked hard, after all. Doesn't mean you loved the play. But polite applause becomes sustained applause, and then someone stands, and suddenly you've turned a tepid exercise of graciousness into a standing ovation. 
