The Crowd Is the Concert

It's the third song of the set. You don't know the name of the person next to you. You don't know where they work or how they voted or what keeps them up at night. What you do know is that they've been mouthing the same words as you since the first note dropped — and when the chorus hit, you both threw your heads back at exactly the same moment, because of course you did. You practiced this. Separately, for years, driving alone or lying in the dark with your headphones in, learning every syllable by heart for exactly this moment. And somehow, that private rehearsal has made the two of you momentarily indistinguishable.

This is the thing people get wrong about fandom. They think it's about the artist, the team, the show. And yes — partly, obviously. But what fandom actually builds, quietly and without fanfare, is some of the most potent conditions for genuine human connection that exist. The star doesn't know your name. The people around you do. Or will.

The Word We Don't Like: Parasocial

"Parasocial" has an unflattering ring to it. Para-social: beside social, close-but-not-quite, a simulation. We use it to describe the bond you feel with a podcaster who doesn't know you're alive, or the character whose fate kept you up all night, or the athlete you've watched so long you feel like you can read their body language in real time. The relationship is real on your end. It goes nowhere on theirs.

But here's where the conversation usually stops too soon. The parasocial bond — the private, one-directional devotion — is rarely a destination. More often, it's infrastructure. It's the shared language that makes it possible for two strangers to look at each other and immediately recognize a member of their tribe. The celebrity is the pretext. The community is the consequence.

What Happens in the Ritual Before the Thing

A 2025 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences followed Brazilian football fans through their team's pregame procession, known as the Rua de Fogo — a march of collective chanting, flares, and shared anticipation (PNAS, 2025). Researchers fitted fans with wearable ECG sensors to track their cardiac rhythms across the event and the match itself. What they found was striking: the ritual before the game produced higher physiological synchrony — heart rates more tightly aligned — than even the most emotionally charged moments of the match.

Think about what that means. The pre-game chanting and marching together in anticipation was binding people's bodies more deeply than a last-minute goal.

This is what fans do in the crowd before the lights go down. In the queue outside the stadium. In the fan section that starts chanting before the warm-up's over. The point of the ritual isn't the performance. The ritual is the performance. And it works — physiologically, measurably — to synchronize the people doing it into something that, for a moment, feels less like a collection of individuals and more like a single organism.

Getting Smaller So You Can Fit Together

There's a particular feeling at a great concert or the decisive moment of a game — something that isn't quite joy and isn't quite fear and isn't quite love but is somehow all of those at once. Researchers call it awe, and it does something specific to the way you perceive yourself in relation to others.

Experimental research found that inducing awe in participants — through images, videos, and experiences of vast natural or human beauty — reliably increased cooperative behavior through two linked mechanisms: first, awe shrinks the perceived self (the "small-self" effect), making your personal concerns feel suddenly minor; and second, awe expands the psychological overlap between you and the people around you, so their interests start to feel more aligned with your own (Piff et al., 2024). You become, briefly, less of a self-contained unit and more of a permeable one.

In a crowd that is genuinely moved together — fans weeping at a bridge, a stadium holding its breath, a theater full of people frozen at the same moment in a scene — this process is happening collectively and at scale. Everyone gets smaller. Everyone gets more porous. The usual psychological armor that keeps strangers at a polite distance thins considerably. You might not know the person next to you, but your nervous systems are briefly running in parallel.

The Ingroup That Reaches Across Divides

One of the more quietly surprising things about fan communities is how genuinely cross-cutting they tend to be. Your love for a particular band doesn't sort by zip code. The forum for your obscure indie record almost certainly contains people from every continent, income bracket, and worldview you can name.

Research helps explain why shared fandom erases so much of what normally divides us. A 2025 study found that experiencing awe reshapes social identity in a specific way: people who feel awe are more likely to perceive themselves as part of a broader, more inclusive "we," and that expanded identity directly reduces dehumanization and prejudice toward people they'd normally consider outsiders (PMC, 2025). When you see a fellow fan as fundamentally like you — bonded by the same strange devotion to the same ridiculous, wonderful thing — the mental categories that usually separate you tend to recede. The jersey or the band tee becomes a passport into a common ingroup that cuts across the ones you were born into.

And when the community moves online, the effect doesn't disappear. A meta-analysis of 88 studies involving over 9,000 participants found that digital intergroup contact — meaningful interaction across group lines through online platforms — produces a significant reduction in prejudice, comparable in direction to the effects documented for in-person contact (Bostyn et al., 2024). Fan communities are, among other things, one of the largest naturally occurring experiments in digital intergroup contact happening anywhere right now.

What This Means for Your Social Life

None of this is to say that fandom is a replacement for intentional relationship-building. Screaming alongside ten thousand people who love the same thing as you will not, by itself, give you a close friend. But it creates the conditions — the shared language, the physiological synchrony, the dissolved self-other boundaries — in which real closeness becomes unusually easy to initiate.

A few things that follow from the research:

Go to the live thing. Streaming the game alone and watching the concert on YouTube are not the same as being physically present in a crowd doing a ritual together. The synchrony documented in the PNAS study depends on bodies in the same space, doing the same things at the same time (PNAS, 2025). Proximity matters. The crowd is the point.

Don't skip the before-and-after. The richest fan bonding often happens in the queue before the doors open and the street outside afterward — when shared anticipation and shared decompression create the most natural openings for actual conversation. "Where did you travel from?" "Did you hear that second song?" These aren't small talk. They're the beginning of the bridge.

Take the online community seriously. If your fandom lives primarily online, that doesn't make it second-tier. The evidence on digital intergroup contact suggests that online fan spaces can genuinely reduce prejudice and build cross-group bonds (Bostyn et al., 2024) — especially when you engage beyond passive scrolling. Comment. Respond. Start the thread. The barriers to connection in fan communities are genuinely lower than in most other contexts because the shared devotion has already done half the introductory work.

Say the name of the thing you love. One of the most reliable ways to find your people in any new context is to mention — without apology — the band, the team, the show, the book series you love. You're not being weird. You're issuing an invitation. Someone nearby may have been waiting for exactly this one.

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There's something worth sitting with here: the relationships we build around shared obsession are routinely dismissed as trivial, even a little embarrassing — the arena tour devotee, the jersey-wearing faithful, the person who can recite every line of dialogue from a canceled show. But research keeps returning to the same finding. What humans need, at the most basic social level, is to feel like they belong to something larger than themselves. Fan communities — with all their fervent, sometimes gloriously absurd devotion — have been providing exactly that, all along.

The star may not know your name. But the person next to you, who has loved the same thing as long as you have, who practiced the same words in the same dark? They might already.