Can stress be harnessed to bond teams deliberately? | Hacker News Reader

Can stress be harnessed to bond teams deliberately?

getperspective.ai

1 pointfapi19745 comments

Posting this question in a slightly different way than I did before. My theory is that it is possible to deliberately structure an experience within 48 hours or so to create a lifelong bond on a team of 4-5 people. I'm trying to figure out what the elements of that experience would be so I'm using a handy AI tool to help me do the research.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Team_building and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T-groups as well as methods used in military training.

If the stress is too severe you'll have trouble, maybe you split the whole team up, maybe one person quits, etc. Maybe somebody files a lawsuit.

Note a few percent of people commit suicide in basic training because of the severe stress involved. https://www.armytimes.com/news/your-army/2020/09/21/fort-sil...

Encounter groups (e.g. "T-Groups") got a bad reputation in the 1970s because they could put people under extreme social pressure.

A few years back (before Ozempic) I'd had an incident where I developed a psychogenic fever after extreme stress which caused me to lose about 15 pounds. (The psychogenic fever is caused by the nervous system activating oxidization of brown fat, which can persist for a few weeks)

I've made some half-hearted attempts since to induce a psychogenic fever including attempts at biofeedback with a thermometer. If I just had some way to measure the tone of the neurons that go to those brown fat cells... Thing is, anything I could expose myself to get extreme stress would be pretty unpleasant, never mind dangerous.

I bet you could cause enough stress by getting 20 people to bully one person in an encounter group over the weekend but that's the kind of experiment you'll never get past the human subject review board.

Yeah, I think what I have in mind is more along the lines of creating a defined goal that people need to achieve in a limited amount of time. Think carrying a sandbag for 20 miles by handing it off between the participants. E.g. pushing themselves physically or mentally, with some time constraints, and helping each other in the process.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

Funny, I use this myself, particularly in HN. I think there is a corollary though, which goes something like "Headlines which ask a question are more likely to attract attention when the subject is of interest to the reader." or "Headlines which leave an unclosed loop cause an impulse to find the solution."

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