Shared Pain Increases Cooperation | Hacker News Reader

Shared Pain Increases Cooperation

pss.sagepub.com

31 pointsyankoff8 comments

I stopped at "...little is known about the social effects of pain." A long time ago I was reading Marine Corps training manuals at USC's Doheny Library (a friend was doing an endorphin study and the Marine's apparently had some some interesting work there) and I can tell you that they not only knew about the social effects of pain, they employed those effects in a variety of training exercises.

I got to see some of it at Navy OCS (where Marine Corps drill instructors lead the military training).

For example, the women in our class always seemed to come in for extra punishment. Nothing demeaning, nothing untoward or out of regs, just... a little extra.

Now, why would those evil Marines pick on those poor women? Because it increased the social bonding of the entire class. It worked even though we knew what kind of mind games they were trying to do!

Moreover it helped pre-emptively dispel the notion that often develops that the women were being held to lower standards. However true that may have been in the Fleet, it wasn't true at OCS, and all thanks to the social effects of pain...

Their conclusion is a little too broad; they don't explore why this might be the case in their experiment. We don't know whether being subjected to pain makes one more cooperative, or whether observing a pain response causes one to be more empathetic and thus cooperative, or whether both are the case, or neither.

For example, studies show that physicians down-regulate their automatic empathetic response. Would physicians therefore not cooperate more? And those with sadistic personality disorder may receive a rewarding feeling from viewing others in pain, which would probably encourage the opposite of cooperation. There could be many cases where the conclusions don't work, but we don't know, because they didn't find out why it was happening.

Nothing new under the sun. It's the origin of all the hazing for freshmen or new military recruits, pain and shared humiliation creates stronger bonds. To overcome adversity you need better friends on who you can rely (trust), natural survival mechanism. War created awesome friendships through pain and worst life conditions ever. Idk about having studies presenting it legitimately but the results were pretty much known for a while.

PDF from the author's site: http://brockbastian.psy.unsw.edu.au/documents/Bastian%20et%2...

Depends what kind of pain. For instance, the pain of manual testing and deployment, when they could have been avoided with bit of planning… just make me want to defect.

Please don't tell the boss! :)

"The beatings will continue until morale improves!"

Who would have thought.

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