Live art is much more exciting than video and motivated goalies dive right. Learn this at The Evening of Herd Behaviour in Utrecht

That the Netherlands and Belgium were separated was due to an opera at the Brussels Monnaie Theatre in 1830. During a particular song in the opera The Mute of Portici the flame struck and the opera-goers ran out of the hall like an angry mob to chase Den 'Ollander out of town.

Such behaviour turns out to be more logical than you might think. Researcher Aafke van Mourik-Broekman demonstrated this with a live survey at Groningen's Noorderzon festival. On Thursday 29 March, she will talk about it at the Evening of Herd Behaviour in the Utrecht festival palace TivoliVredenburg.

Tinder for monkeys

Fourteen scientists from the field of Social Psychology come to talk about what makes their profession so fascinating during the Evening of Herd Behaviour. That it is not just about people is perhaps the most surprising thing. Mariska Kret from Leiden University provides that element. She is fascinated by ape behaviour and has thus already discovered that there is little difference between chimpanzees and bonobos when it comes to the way they approach each other, or conversely keep each other at a distance. Emotions, it turns out, are not limited to humans, and recognising emotions is not just reserved for us. Just turns out that apes appreciate a conspecific more through the hindquarters than through the face, something that has clearly evolved differently in us. Usually.

Kret is currently developing a Tinder for monkeys. She has already discovered that baboons and bonobos can handle a touchscreen. Now it's just a matter of finding out what factors they rely on when picking a partner. That's not just a fun goal. Both monkey species are in danger of extinction and often zoos fail to introduce the right partners to each other. Since with monkeys the eye apparently wants something too, such a monkey app could prevent a lot of empty lugging.

Empty lugging

Art is one thing that - in my experience at times - psychologists walk around with a wide bow. Often because they think it's idle chatter. However, this is not the case for Aafke van Mourik Broekman who, with Kirsten Krans of dance group Random Collision examined how 'watching dance' affects people. That influence turned out to be greater than expected, the researchers tell in a radio interview. While the dance mainly showed fraternisation and love, when a group task was performed afterwards, the audience also showed a great inclination to work together. If the audience saw a dance piece full of wandering individuals, it did not come to much good afterwards either.

Van Mourik also found that such effects were mainly linked to a live event. if the spectators only saw a video of the dance performance, it hardly had any effect. Watching art live thus actively encourages action.

Cheese

Incidentally, the same applies to the story of the mouse, the cheese and the owl. Marieke Roskes studied the effect of a story's good or bad ending on the reader's creativity. A bad ending usually leads to avoidance behaviour, while a good ending encourages action. Roskes, an Amsterdam-based psychologist, researches the effects of avoidance behaviour and approach behaviour on human action and creativity. She already discovered many fascinating things.

Approach-oriented people appear to have a strong tendency to move to the right. Even people who usually prefer to avoid things will, when the chips are down, get creative and have a tendency to move to the right even then.

Penalties

What exactly that will entail we will witness on Thursday. Already it is certain that Roskes' research has major implications for football. Her team examined all penalty shoot-outs in all World Cup matches and discovered that goalkeepers dive to the right in three quarters of the cases when they are really motivated to act. This motivation arises especially when the goalkeeper's team is behind, so the ball has to be stopped. When the teams are equal or the goalkeeper's team is ahead, they dive to the left as often as to the right. We are curious to see if this research has implications for upcoming shootouts.