Why do people boo performers? Example: I was at Geek Bowl 2012, which was this huge team trivia event in an auditorium, and toward the end of the night they invited participants to come on-stage and dance in teams for 45 seconds per team. Only 4 of the 200 teams volunteered, and while they danced, the crowd noisily jeered them. Now, the dancing wasn’t great, but...
These are amateurs and they’re clearly nervous. Based on those facts alone, I would cheer them no matter what. Golden Rule, right? It’s only 45 seconds.
You gain nothing from booing them, except possibly you signal...what? Being loud and opinionated? Being in a position of judgement and therefore high-status?
Even assuming there’s a signaling explanation, I cannot figure out the thought process that leads to booing. Like, they somehow get angry at the performers? Or is it morbid curiosity, and they wonder if it’ll get even worse if the dancers get flustered?
It’s fun to boo. Expressing public displeasure with someone in a totally safe and one-sided fashion Is something people love to do: See forums.
Doing the same thing as the crowd around you is very thrilling. If some people start booing other people are likely to join in.
People actually DO get angry at performers. People tend to have strong senses of entitlement in these kind of situations and if they’re disappointed they will be upset. Not everyone is crass enough to boo but surely you’ve felt ripped off in the past by a performance that was worse than what you expected?
Thanks for the reply, and upvoted. Now there are three things I don’t understand ;-). It rings true in the sense that people can be reliably expected to behave that way. But I still cannot empathize, and if I have the same mental machinery as the booers, then I ought to be able to.
Fun to boo. This one feels right and yet so foreign. Shouldn’t sympathy for the target of criticism kill the fun? Like you imagine doing something hurtful, then you picture the other person, hurt. Then you imagine what it would be like to be that person, and, jeez, I wouldn’t want that! So I’d better be nice to them. (This is why I still can’t empathize with cruelty. I can see hurting someone unintentionally, or when the stakes were high, but petty malice is so weird. What are these people thinking?)
Thrill of the crowd. Sometimes it’s easier to go along with the crowd, like if everyone is doing X, then it’s just simpler to do X than to do nothing. And sometimes you can use the crowd dynamics to get away with something you’d never do as an individual. But thrilling? Like a roller coaster, or gambling?
Anger. Sure, I’ve seen bad performances. But booing doesn’t improve them; it only makes them worse for anyone in the audience that might be enjoying themselves. And it’s almost never the performers’ fault in the sense that they’re doing it to me, so any anger would be misplaced. And even if I was actually angry with a performer, booing isn’t the best way to take it out on them. It’s just the most public way.
Then again, misplaced anger serves a useful purpose in some contexts. My buddy’s sister gets a lot of good deals at stores because she verbally abuses the employees, and she does this not to get the deals (that would be sociopathy), but because she always perceives an insult (“Did you see the way he was looking at me?!”). Maybe it makes sense to have a general policy of getting “irrationally” angry sometimes.
Shouldn’t sympathy for the target of criticism kill the fun? Like you imagine doing something hurtful, then you picture the other person, hurt.
You’re expecting lots of people to perform the extra work of imagining that.
But thrilling?
Yeah, many people get positive feelings from being swept up in crowd behavior, like laughing at a comedy or applauding at the end of a great performance. Booing is a similar behavior.
Personally, I think it’s just that it’s considered acceptable feedback. It’s appropriate to laugh, cheer, clap, or boo depending on context. The performers get honest feedback from the audience.
Not particularly referring to your experience, but instead drawing from a few dozen rock festivals I’ve been to in the past decade.
You gain nothing from booing them, except possibly you signal...what? Being loud and opinionated? Being in a position of judgement and therefore high-status?
This is the main reason, for what I saw. Booing an act puts you on a higher level than the people who like it, and have therefore bad taste. In addition, it could also signal the membership to a different fan group.
Even assuming there’s a signaling explanation, I cannot figure out the thought process that leads to booing. Like, they somehow get angry at the performers? Or is it morbid curiosity, and they wonder if it’ll get even worse if the dancers get flustered?
A classic festival example that I personally witnessed. A few years ago I was at an heavy metal festival, with many groups performing the same day. There were a few extreme metal groups (Obituary, Slayer and Stormlord IIRC), and a very noisy group of extreme metal fans. Unfortunately, sandwiched between those acts, the organizers inserted Lacuna Coil (a roughly gothic metal group, much softer, with a wider fanbase outside of the metal community, including a fair share of teenage girls). Needless to say, the extreme metallers completely ruined the performance with boos, and at some point started launching plastic bottles. They were clearly trying to show which was the dominant group, and if you didn’t boo, then you weren’t part of such group.
I’m guilty of booing sometimes, and to me the thought process seems to be:
1) The bad performance makes me feel bad.
2) The crowd is similar to me, and is my in-group in the situation.
3) Therefore, the bad performance is making everyone else in the crowd feel bad.
4) I empathise with the crowd more than the performers, since the crowd is a constant in-group I can identify with through the entire event, while the performers are fleeting and on average neutral.
5) Therefore to signal my anger on behalf of the crowd’s suffering, I boo at the bad performer, who has slid from neutral to Enemy.
This is an awesomely clear explanation of the thought process. I can see how “willingness to take on an enemy” or “willingness to speak for everyone” may be deciding factors in who boos and who doesn’t. It also explains why booing only happens in large crowds (at sufficiently small events, everybody is in the same group). Cheers!
A part of it is people’s expectations are raised for stage performances.
I’m part of a circus, and I’ve found that if I just do something with a friend in public, people will be impressed, but it takes a lot more to get people to cheer when I’m on stage.
So even decent acts aren’t viewed as good when they’re in front of an audience.
I think Cthulhoo had the best answer so far, but let me throw in my two cents. The (unconscious) thought process behind the boos, as I guess it, is: “I am watching a bad performance, and thus I am becoming associated with it. An observer who saw the situation now would think I am the kind of person who likes this kind of performance, which would lower my status. To reaffirm my status against this threat by dissociating myself from the performers, I boo them.”
“Get off the stage” is a commonly shouted “boo”. In this case it wouldn’t matter very much but… if you don’t particularly want to see the dancing, would you have wanted there to be even more teams volunteering? I imagine that part of the reason to “boo” is to get the current performer to end their act prematurely and to discourage future bad performances.
Don’t you think that most teams would prefer that organizers would not have this idea? If so, booing all the volunteers is making it costlier to participate in the stupid (in my the booer point of view) thing that is slightly unpleasant for me to have to observe.
Why do people boo performers? Example: I was at Geek Bowl 2012, which was this huge team trivia event in an auditorium, and toward the end of the night they invited participants to come on-stage and dance in teams for 45 seconds per team. Only 4 of the 200 teams volunteered, and while they danced, the crowd noisily jeered them. Now, the dancing wasn’t great, but...
These are amateurs and they’re clearly nervous. Based on those facts alone, I would cheer them no matter what. Golden Rule, right? It’s only 45 seconds.
You gain nothing from booing them, except possibly you signal...what? Being loud and opinionated? Being in a position of judgement and therefore high-status?
Even assuming there’s a signaling explanation, I cannot figure out the thought process that leads to booing. Like, they somehow get angry at the performers? Or is it morbid curiosity, and they wonder if it’ll get even worse if the dancers get flustered?
It’s fun to boo. Expressing public displeasure with someone in a totally safe and one-sided fashion Is something people love to do: See forums.
Doing the same thing as the crowd around you is very thrilling. If some people start booing other people are likely to join in.
People actually DO get angry at performers. People tend to have strong senses of entitlement in these kind of situations and if they’re disappointed they will be upset. Not everyone is crass enough to boo but surely you’ve felt ripped off in the past by a performance that was worse than what you expected?
Upvoted. But surely you mean OTHER forums?
Thanks for the reply, and upvoted. Now there are three things I don’t understand ;-). It rings true in the sense that people can be reliably expected to behave that way. But I still cannot empathize, and if I have the same mental machinery as the booers, then I ought to be able to.
Fun to boo. This one feels right and yet so foreign. Shouldn’t sympathy for the target of criticism kill the fun? Like you imagine doing something hurtful, then you picture the other person, hurt. Then you imagine what it would be like to be that person, and, jeez, I wouldn’t want that! So I’d better be nice to them. (This is why I still can’t empathize with cruelty. I can see hurting someone unintentionally, or when the stakes were high, but petty malice is so weird. What are these people thinking?)
Thrill of the crowd. Sometimes it’s easier to go along with the crowd, like if everyone is doing X, then it’s just simpler to do X than to do nothing. And sometimes you can use the crowd dynamics to get away with something you’d never do as an individual. But thrilling? Like a roller coaster, or gambling?
Anger. Sure, I’ve seen bad performances. But booing doesn’t improve them; it only makes them worse for anyone in the audience that might be enjoying themselves. And it’s almost never the performers’ fault in the sense that they’re doing it to me, so any anger would be misplaced. And even if I was actually angry with a performer, booing isn’t the best way to take it out on them. It’s just the most public way.
Then again, misplaced anger serves a useful purpose in some contexts. My buddy’s sister gets a lot of good deals at stores because she verbally abuses the employees, and she does this not to get the deals (that would be sociopathy), but because she always perceives an insult (“Did you see the way he was looking at me?!”). Maybe it makes sense to have a general policy of getting “irrationally” angry sometimes.
You’re expecting lots of people to perform the extra work of imagining that.
Yeah, many people get positive feelings from being swept up in crowd behavior, like laughing at a comedy or applauding at the end of a great performance. Booing is a similar behavior.
Personally, I think it’s just that it’s considered acceptable feedback. It’s appropriate to laugh, cheer, clap, or boo depending on context. The performers get honest feedback from the audience.
Not particularly referring to your experience, but instead drawing from a few dozen rock festivals I’ve been to in the past decade.
This is the main reason, for what I saw. Booing an act puts you on a higher level than the people who like it, and have therefore bad taste. In addition, it could also signal the membership to a different fan group.
A classic festival example that I personally witnessed. A few years ago I was at an heavy metal festival, with many groups performing the same day. There were a few extreme metal groups (Obituary, Slayer and Stormlord IIRC), and a very noisy group of extreme metal fans. Unfortunately, sandwiched between those acts, the organizers inserted Lacuna Coil (a roughly gothic metal group, much softer, with a wider fanbase outside of the metal community, including a fair share of teenage girls). Needless to say, the extreme metallers completely ruined the performance with boos, and at some point started launching plastic bottles. They were clearly trying to show which was the dominant group, and if you didn’t boo, then you weren’t part of such group.
I’m guilty of booing sometimes, and to me the thought process seems to be:
1) The bad performance makes me feel bad.
2) The crowd is similar to me, and is my in-group in the situation.
3) Therefore, the bad performance is making everyone else in the crowd feel bad.
4) I empathise with the crowd more than the performers, since the crowd is a constant in-group I can identify with through the entire event, while the performers are fleeting and on average neutral.
5) Therefore to signal my anger on behalf of the crowd’s suffering, I boo at the bad performer, who has slid from neutral to Enemy.
This is an awesomely clear explanation of the thought process. I can see how “willingness to take on an enemy” or “willingness to speak for everyone” may be deciding factors in who boos and who doesn’t. It also explains why booing only happens in large crowds (at sufficiently small events, everybody is in the same group). Cheers!
A part of it is people’s expectations are raised for stage performances.
I’m part of a circus, and I’ve found that if I just do something with a friend in public, people will be impressed, but it takes a lot more to get people to cheer when I’m on stage.
So even decent acts aren’t viewed as good when they’re in front of an audience.
I think Cthulhoo had the best answer so far, but let me throw in my two cents. The (unconscious) thought process behind the boos, as I guess it, is: “I am watching a bad performance, and thus I am becoming associated with it. An observer who saw the situation now would think I am the kind of person who likes this kind of performance, which would lower my status. To reaffirm my status against this threat by dissociating myself from the performers, I boo them.”
Volunteering to perform is a huge status move.
“Get off the stage” is a commonly shouted “boo”. In this case it wouldn’t matter very much but… if you don’t particularly want to see the dancing, would you have wanted there to be even more teams volunteering? I imagine that part of the reason to “boo” is to get the current performer to end their act prematurely and to discourage future bad performances.
See also: Vaudeville Hook
Don’t you think that most teams would prefer that organizers would not have this idea? If so, booing all the volunteers is making it costlier to participate in the stupid (in my the booer point of view) thing that is slightly unpleasant for me to have to observe.