Members in the Media
From: Pacific Standard

The Bonding Power of Shared Suffering

Pacific Standard:

Managers: Are you having trouble melding your employees into a cohesive group? Is getting them to trust and cooperate with one another proving to be a challenge?

Well, newly published research offers an effective, if not especially ethical, solution to your problem: Inflict some pain.

A new study from Australia suggests rituals such as arduous initiation rites serve a real purpose. It reports experiencing physical discomfort is an effective way for a group of strangers to cohere into a close-knit group.

”Shared pain may be an important trigger for group formation,” a research team led by psychologist Brock Bastian of the University of New South Wales writes in the journal Psychological Science. “Pain, it seems, has the capacity to act as social glue, building cooperation within novel social collectives.”

Read the whole story: Pacific Standard

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