
Shared Pain Increases Cooperation - yankoff
http://pss.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/09/04/0956797614545886.abstract
======
ChuckMcM
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.

~~~
mpyne
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...

------
peterwwillis
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.

------
fataliss
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.

------
dougmccune
PDF from the author's site:
[http://brockbastian.psy.unsw.edu.au/documents/Bastian%20et%2...](http://brockbastian.psy.unsw.edu.au/documents/Bastian%20et%20al%20Psych%20Science%202014.pdf)

------
loup-vaillant
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.

------
sixdimensional
Please don't tell the boss! :)

"The beatings will continue until morale improves!"

------
dominotw
Who would have thought.

