Organizing under the title L'Assurance des Success Dramatiques, they leased themselves and their employees to singeers and opera managers who wished to be assured of an appreciative audience response. So effective were they in stimulating genuine audience reaction with their rigged reactions that before long claques (usually consisting of a leader - chef de claque - and several individual claqueurs) had become an established and persistent tradition throughout the world of opera. As music historian Robert Sabin notes, "By 1830 the claque was a full-blown institution, collecting by day, applauding by night, all in the honest open....But it is altogether probable that neither Sauton, or his ally Porcher, had a notion of the extent to which their scheme of paid applause would be adopted and applied wherever opera was sung."
Robert B. Cialdini, PH.D., 'Influence, The Psychology of Persuasion.' page 158.