The Bio-Functional Audience: Shared Physiological Alignment to Narrative Media

Communication research into audience responses has traditionally emphasized how individual or group differences create variance in interpretation while overlooking a more fundamental phenomenon: the capacity of the same message to induce similar responses across receivers. We introduce a bio-functional definition of the audience, a temporal collective bound together by the moment-to-moment alignment of its members’ physiological responses. In a large-scale experiment ( N = 198) monitoring eye-tracking, heart rate, and electrodermal activity during a film, we mapped a processing hierarchy in which audience response alignment was strongest for gaze but also extended into downstream autonomic responses. Furthermore, a temporal manipulation of the narrative sequence abolished aligned responses, confirming that the induced audience state is driven by the message content. We conclude that messages function as alignment devices that reduce individual noise and bring distinct individuals into a shared processing state, thus providing a grounded, signal-based definition of the audience as a bio-functional entity.