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Audience Responses to Heroic Speeches

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Encyclopedia of Heroism Studies

Synonyms

Applause; Audience reaction; Behavior; Contagion; Emotion

Definition

Audience responses to heroic speeches can include laughter, booing, applause, cheering, chanting, and combinations thereof.

Heroic leadership, especially transformative leadership that significantly influences followers, societies, and even the world at large (Goethals and Allison 2012), is premised upon followers needing leaders to coordinate response to recurrent evolutionary problems that rely upon cooperation among group members for survival (Spisak et al. 2015). Leaders are looked to by their followers for solutions (Van Vugt and Smith 2019; Van Vugt and von Rueden 2020) that, as pointed out by Goethals and Allison (Goethals and Allison 2012) “helps groups survive, achieve their goals, and feel good about themselves” (p. 29). The thoughts, feelings, and behaviors are communicated to followers with followers in turn reciprocating not just by listening, but through reactions that may take the form of...

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Correspondence to Patrick A. Stewart .

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Stewart, P.A., Eubanks, A.D. (2024). Audience Responses to Heroic Speeches. In: Allison, S.T., Beggan, J.K., Goethals, G.R. (eds) Encyclopedia of Heroism Studies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-48129-1_166

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