In 2023, the resale price for a ticket to the sold-out Carabao Cup final went over £1000. But why would people pay so much when they could watch the match at home with a Sky Sports subscription for around £40 per month? Or even go to a pub and enjoy the game for just a few pounds?
This isn’t just true for sports events. Concerts and theatre shows in London sell out all the time. So what makes live performances so special? Some people say it’s being in the same room as the performers. Others think it’s the better sound and visuals in theatres.
In this blog, I will turn the camera to the other side of the stage, our fellow audience members. Whether we know them or not, they might be what makes live performances so great.
One big difference between watching a performance live and watching it at home is being around other people. Sharing experiences with others is important to us. Being in a crowd can make us feel more connected and even make our bodies respond in similar ways. This can make our emotions stronger and give live experiences more emotional value. Studies in theatres, cinemas and concerts have shown that when people watch a performance with others, their emotions are more intense than when they watch it alone at home.
Although defining what makes a quality experience is often complicated, engagement is one of the go-to concepts in collective experience research. It is related to the level of emotional involvement and immersion during the experience. A rich emotional experience like Prima Facie (one of my favourite plays in 2022) would be more engaging than a monotonous lecture.
But measuring engagement can be tricky. In the past, researchers have averaged the audience’s heart rate (indicating average emotional changes) or asked them to fill out a questionnaire afterwards. But this doesn’t show how engagement changes throughout the experience. For example, we wouldn’t know if the first act was more engaging than the second, or if a monologue was more engaging than a dance scene.
Recent research has looked at how people’s heart rates and skin responses change in similar ways when they share an experience. This is called physiological synchrony (PS). In a way, it can indicate how similar the changes in emotions are between people. Since a good performance should be understandable to everyone, PS is a useful way to measure audience engagement. Some studies have even found a link between PS and how engaged the audience feels. By measuring how the audience’s bodies respond together, researchers can now study engagement at specific moments during a performance. And we can also understand overall engagement with more information. In the next section, we’ll talk about a new study that looks at how being around others can affect audience engagement at a live football match using PS.
What we did
Last November, taking the opportunity of that unusually timed world cup, we invited 30 participants to come to our lab and watch one of the world cup matches live (yea we aren’t rich enough to get them to the actual stadium in Qatar). After a serious debate between a lab mate and myself, we chose the Poland v Mexico match. We certainly couldn’t choose any of the England matches or other more popular teams to avoid our humble lab testing rooms becoming central line at rush hours.
We split the participants into two groups. One group watched the match together (the collective group), while the other group watched it alone (the alone group). Before the match, we put a small sensor on each person’s finger to measure their heart rate and skin activity. We also asked them some questions before and after the match about how they felt about the match (engagement) and how often they watch sports in the past (social identity).
What we found
Let’s just skip how the boring statistical analysis was done, we don’t want to read about ‘cross recurrence quantification analysis’ and ‘linear mixed effect model’ in a psychology of audience experience blog, don’t we?
We found something surprising. The group that watched the match alone had more synchronised heart rates and skin activity. They also rated the experience as more engaging than the group that watched together. This suggests that being around others in fact made the experience less engaging.
We also found that people who had similar past experiences in watching sports were more synchronised. For example, two lifelong football fans had more similar heart rate changing patterns with each other than with someone who doesn’t watch sports as often.
What does that mean?
Our findings suggest that it might be better to watch sports and performances alone rather than paying for expensive tickets to see them live. Although I certainly don’t feel this way, This matches recent news that more people prefer to watch football on live streams instead of going to the stadium, in the post-COVID era. This could affect how broadcasting rights and advertisements are sold. It could also encourage broadcasters to improve their TV quality (Come on Sky, make the sub cheaper!). Teams should also focus more on their online matchday activities.
But there’s another way to look at it. The match we showed our participants was a 0-0 draw, so it was pretty boring. participants would shift their attention to different things (the dramatic illustration of the team manager, the pizza at the back etc.) People in the collective group might have been more distracted because they were in a larger room with more people around. We suggest that boredom may facilitate a spread of inattention through the crowd.
Even in this case, people with similar social identities paid attention to similar things, as seen in the synchrony. This suggests that creating closer connections between audience members through membership schemes and curated events may be more effective than installing better audio-visual systems or massage chairs (I certainly hate those) in venues.
‘Long live live performances!’
PS: what’s better than actually seeing how it’s done? our lab will continue to do those kinds of audience engagement research in the upcoming months and even years, if you are interested in earning £10/hr just for watching movies or musicals, pop me a message!
Key References:
[1].https://www.acnlabs.co.uk/case-studies/going-to-the-theatre-is-as-good-for-your-heart-as-30-minutes-of-cardio
[2].Fröber, K., & Thomaschke, R. (2021). In the dark cube: Movie theater context enhances the
valuation and aesthetic experience of watching films. Psychology of Aesthetics,
Creativity, and the Arts, 15(3), 528. https://www.proquest.com/openview/056ee202b622f7d9b253a401545ba30a/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=60970
[3]Millman, L. M., Richardson, D. C., & Orgs, G. (2022). Continuous and collective measures of real-time audience engagement. Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts, 293-307. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003033226-23/continuous-collective-measures-real-time-audience-engagement-merritt-millman-daniel-richardson-guido-orgs
[4].Lee, H., & Orgs, G. (2022). Experiencing art in social settings. The Routledge International Handbook of Neuroaesthetics, 448-460. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/chapters/edit/10.4324/9781003008675-26/experiencing-art-social-settings-haeeun-lee-guido-orgs
[5]. Ardizzi, M., Calbi, M., Tavaglione, S., Umiltà, M. A., & Gallese, V. (2020). Audience spontaneous entrainment during the collective enjoyment of live performances: physiological and behavioral measurements. Scientific reports, 10(1), 1-12. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7052145/