Trigger Events

A more socially oriented phenomenon is what I call Trigger Events. Trigger Events are highly public events that happen at a party, and that serves as a precedent, establishing a certain mood for the rest of the evening.

 

In my university years, I repeatedly served as a mentor for the new students. One of the elements of the mentoring programme was a three-day excursion, where we would invade a house in the country with approximately 150 people, play games during the day, and party during the night.

 

The first time I went, it was fairly quiet on the romantic front. Sure, a few people ended up kissing, but it was all very discrete and proper, and there wasn’t a lot of it. Next year, however, was completely different. At the beginning of the first party, where people had barely started to get intoxicated, a couple suddenly started kissing each other passionately in the middle of the dance floor for all to see. They subsequently moved to the nearest wall, where they moved from kissing to prolonged groping – still in plain sight of everybody.

 

What happened next was fantastic. If was as if everybody looked around with a guarded look on their face, saw nobody reacting to it, and then thought to themselves, “Okay, what the hell, tonight is apparently that kind of party”. Needless to say, the rest of the night – and the rest of the trip – was a study in semi-promiscuous behaviour as people started acting as if they were on a Greek island, far from everybody they knew. By a quick tally in the bus ride home, the number of people making out was more than three times as high as the previous year.

 

This is what Trigger Events is all about: changing the nature of a social get-together by signaling that a certain behaviour, normally thought inappropriate, is now fully acceptable. Trigger Events create temporary social islands where the normal rules are nullified. It doesn’t have to be about sex. It can be something as simple as the host breaking a fine crystal glass at a fancy dinner party and laughing about it. A friend of mine told me about a company party where right after dinner, the normally austere CEO had gotten up on a stage in front of the entire company and danced like crazy, after which all hell broke loose on the dance floor. At the beginning of a pheasant hunt I was on, where you could only shoot the male birds, the host – standing in front of everybody – mistakenly shot and killed two female birds; after that, female birds went down in troves. And at a recent party I attended with my MBA class in an Andorran ski village, two of the girls from the class went up on a balcony and did a dance with some succinct lesbian undertones; for the rest of the night, my fellow students (normally a well-behaved crowd) would walk up to their co-students and lick them on the cheek, just for the heck of it. Magnificent party, really.

 

Trigger Events can make all the difference, creating the mood of the party. I imagine that when discoteque owners pay professional dancers to dance on stages and in cages, they are trying to do something similar. However, I suspect this works less well than it should. Trigger Events are most effective when it is performed by your peers (especially if you know them). A professional dancer just isn’t the same thing; she’s not breaking any social rules, she is just doing what she is paid for, and people know this. Instead of dressing up like something between a stripper and a Las Vegas showgirl, I think it would be far more effective if the paid dancers looked and dressed like everybody else, even to the extent of hiding the fact that they are actually employed. I envision a discoteque in which several of the ‘guests’ are in fact paid party starters, creating Trigger Events by overtly making out with their (similarly employed) boyfriends, in the bar, on the dance floor, and wherever else the party needs to get started.

Music Volume

A simple yet powerful illustration of the things I want to explore with this blog is provided by music – or, more specifically, the music volume. The DJ or bar owner has a very effective tool at his disposal that can be used to influence how people behave in the disco: turning up the volume.
At the quiet end of the spectrum, there is soft background music. Conversations seem to flow easier when there is music in the background. It fills out conversational pauses that could otherwise have been awkward. It filters out the conversation of bystanders and creates a more private space where others cannot overhear what you talk about. And it provides a common subject that you can talk about with the people around you: “Cool song – isn’t that San Germain?” Also, it apparently makes people feel more at ease – notice how many airlines play soft music at take-off and landings (presumably to drown out the noise of the wings falling off). Similarly, among managers of department stores, it is a well-known fact that shoppers stay longer (and buy more) if the store is filled with pleasant music.

This is all part of creating a specific atmosphere, a fact which may seem self-evidently simple. But consider what other bars do: They turn up the volume significantly higher. At some noise level – I don’t know the exact decibel limit – it has a more specific and observable result: It becomes impossible to carry on a conversation in a large group. Turn it up even more, and three-people conversations become difficult as well. As the DJ turns up the music, he in effect determines how people interact in the bar.

At some noise level, even two-person conversations present significant challenges. To hear each other, you need to put your mouth right next to the ear of your conversation partner, maybe even cupping your hand and shouting to get the message across. I have been in discotheques where the music level was so loud that not even this was possible. In some types of discos, the more house- and techno-oriented ones, the combination of physical proximity and conversational isolation seems to be the main attraction.

It is a good question whether there is a conscious calculation behind the loud music volume, and if so, what the reasoning behind it is. Maybe bar owners have found that guests drink more the less they talk. Or maybe the forced proximity is appreciated by the guests who then have a tangible excuse to get in close physical contact with the opposite sex – an objective which may be the ultimate goal of any human activity. (My guess would be that you come back to the bars in which you tend to get lucky). Or maybe, it is something which is mostly determined by either chance or old habits, or according to the whims of whatever DJ is spinning that day.

Of course, there is the related question of the genre of the music. The type of music seems to be a driving factor when it comes to the patrons’ selection of which bar to go to. (Also, Heavy Metal somehow doesn’t come across in the right way when played at a barely audible level). I’ll come back to this in a future post.

Party Dynamics Goes Live

After reading Paco Underhill’s great book on how people behave in department stores, Why We Buy: The Science of Shopping, I started thinking about parties.

As most other people, I have been to a great number of parties and social gatherings during my life; some were fantastic, a painful few were abysmally boring, with the majority somewhere in between. At the great parties, I just had fun – but at the more boring ones, with nothing to occupy my attention, I would start thinking about why the party was boring. What went wrong? Why weren’t people having fun? And gradually, I started looking around at the fun parties, as well. What made these evenings a success? What did it take to turn an unpromising setup into a raving mass of happy people? What makes the difference?

The curiosity about this seemed to stay with me. Slowly, over several years, I began to see some patterns, some similarities across the different types of parties. And thus, the idea of studying Party Dynamics was born.

The question I want to explore is this: What key factors determine whether a party becomes a success or a catastrophe? Specifically, if we were to set up videocameras in discoteques and bars all over the world, what would we find? What patterns of human behaviour would emerge? What correlations would exist between those behaviours and the way the party is organised – considering everything from the identity, gender and age of the people to the music, the room, the lightning level, the dresscode, the alcohol served, the behaviour of others, the invitations, the number of partygoers, the familiarity of the other guests, the location, the objectives of the people, and the nature of the party itself?

And, more importantly, could we use this knowledge to create better parties?

I have no clue whether this is something that has already been studied. If it has, it has likely taken place within the fields of sociology, ethnology or anthropology. I would be more than happy to hear from you if you know of any such studies. What I suspect, however, is that most of this knowledge is not written down anywhere, but resides in the heads of bar owners, wedding planners, event agencies, discoteque managers, professional hostesses, and other creatures of the night. That is what I want to change.

To do so, I will use this space to start posting my own theories and ideas on the subject. Please don’t hesitate to leave a comment if you have any input or ideas of your own.