Clapping for somebody else’s win costs you nothing and says everything about you.

Somebody else winning does not remove anything from you, even though it can feel that way for a second. That second is the whole test. What you do with it, whether you say the genuine thing or go quiet, is visible to everybody in the room and gets remembered as a fact about your character rather than about the moment.

Say the specific version rather than the general one. Name what they actually did well. It takes ten seconds, it is free, and it is one of the few things people remember years later.