Pacific Standard: 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.”
The researchers argue that pain promotes cooperation because of its “well-demonstrated capacity to capture attention and focus awareness.”

Bastian and his colleagues describe three experiments that provide evidence for this proposition, which was first proposed by such social theorists as Emile Durkheim. [Continue reading…]