Groups clapping in unison undergo size-dependent error-induced frequency increase
Why this work is in the frame
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
Humans clapping together in unison is a familiar and robust example of emergent synchrony. We find that in experiments, such groups (from two to a few hundred) always increase clapping frequency, and larger groups increase more quickly. Based on single-person experiments and modeling, an individual tendency to rush is ruled out as an explanation. Instead, an asymmetric sensitivity in aural interactions explains the frequency increase, whereby individuals correct more strongly to match neighbour claps that precede their own clap, than those that follow it. A simple conceptual coupled oscillator model based on this interaction recovers the main features observed in experiments, and shows that the collective frequency increase is driven by the small timing errors in individuals, and the resulting inter-individual interactions that occur to maintain unison.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it