For the How to Run a Successful Less Wrong Meetup booklet, I'm looking for information about how to better build a social group and foster a feeling of community. Since this bit is probably of general interest, I'm posting it here.
If you want to make the members of the group like each other more and feel more like a group, synchronized actions may be one of the easiest ways of achieving this goal. Anthropologists have long known the community-building effect of dancing:
As the dancer loses himself in the dance, as he becomes absorbed in the unified community, he reaches a state of elation in which he feels himself filled with an energy of force immensely beyond his ordinary state . . . finding himself in complete and ecstatic harmony with all the fellow-members of his community, experiences a great increase in his feelings of amity and attachment towards them. (Radcliffe-Brown 1933/1948, quoted in Kesebir 2011)
Armies around the world utilize the same effect to foster a feeling of unison through repeated drills:
Words are inadequate to describe the emotion aroused by the prolonged movement in unison that drilling involved. A sense of pervasive well-being is what I recall; more specifically, a strange sense of personal enlargement; a sort of swelling out, becoming bigger than life, thanks to participation in collective ritual. (McNeill 1995, quoted in Kesebir 2011)
Wiltermuth & Heath (2009) summarize some of the research on the topic:
The idea that synchronous movement improves group cohesion has old roots. As historian William H. McNeill suggests, armies, churches, and communities may have all benefited, intentionally or unintentionally, from cultural practices that draw on ‘‘muscular bonding,’’ or physical synchrony, to solidify ties between members (McNeill, 1995). This physical synchrony, which occurs when people move in time with one another, has been argued to produce positive emotions that weaken the boundaries between the self and the group (Ehrenreich, 2006; Hannah, 1977), leading to feelings of collective effervescence that enable groups to remain cohesive (Durkheim, 1915/1965; Haidt, Seder, & Kesebir, in press; Turner, 1969/1995). Andaman Islanders have been said to become ‘‘absorbed in the unified community’’ through dance (Radcliffe-Brown, 1922, p. 252). Similar observations have been made of Carnival revelers (Ehrenreich, 2006), and ravers dancing to beat-heavy music (Olaveson, 2004). Moreover, Haidt et al. (in press) have argued that people must occasionally lose themselves in a larger social organism to achieve the highest levels of individual well-being.
Some recent findings on the topic include:
Wiltermuth & Heath (2009): Synchronous activity in the form of walking around a campus in step causes people to be more likely to make decisions requiring trust and to self-report stronger feelings of trust and connectedness with others. Singing in synchrony, even if the song is an out-group anthem ("O Canada", when the subjects were USA residents), causes more trust and and greater feelings of being on the same team, as well as an increased willingness to cooperate in a public goods game.
Kirschner & Tomasello (2010): "Given that in traditional cultures music making and dancing are often integral parts of important group ceremonies such as initiation rites, weddings or preparations for battle, one hypothesis is that music evolved into a tool that fosters social bonding and group cohesion, ultimately increasing prosocial ingroup behavior and cooperation. Here we provide support for this hypothesis by showing that joint music making among 4-year-old children increases subsequent spontaneous cooperative and helpful behavior, relative to a carefully matched control condition with the same level of social and linguistic interaction but no music."
Valdesolo, Ouyang & DeSteno (2010): Synchronous rocking increases perceptions of similarity and connectedness. The subjects were given the task of holding the opposite ends of a 12 × 14 wooden labyrinth with both hands and guiding a steel ball through it together. The subjects in the synchronous rocking condition performed better than the subjects in the asynchronous rocking condition.
Valdesolo & DeSteno (2011): Subjects who are told to tap the beats they hear in an audio clip, and are paired with a confederate who has been instructed to synchronize his tapping with the participant’s, tend to find like the confederate more and consider him more similar to themselves. The confederate being assigned an unfair task then evokes more feelings of compassion, and the subjects are more likely to help him, even at a cost to themselves.
The implication for meetup groups, as well as any other groups that might want to make their members like each other more, seems clear: spend some time singing and dancing together, possibly in the form of drinking songs if people are too self-conscious to sing while sober. Just make sure that any non-drinkers don't feel excluded. If all else fails, you can always march around the city while chanting "doom doom DOOM DOOM". (If anybody asks, you can say that you're testing a scientific hypothesis about group bonding, and ask if they'd want to join in.)
References
Kesebir, S. (2011) The Superorganism Account of Human Sociality: How and When Human Groups Are Like Beehives (ungated version). Personality and Social Psychology Review.
Kirchner, S. & Tomasello, M. (2010) Joint music making promotes prosocial behavior in 4-year-old children. Evolution and Human Behavior 31, 354–364.
McNeill, W.H. (1995) Keeping together in time: Dance and drill in human history. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Radcliffe-Brown, A. R. (1948) The Andaman Islanders. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.
Valdesolo, P. & DeSteno, D. (2011) Synchrony and the Social Tuning of Compassion. Emotion, vol. 11, no. 2, 262–266.
Valdesolo, P. & Ouyang, J. & DeSteno, D. (2010) The rhythm of joint action: Synchrony promotes cooperative ability. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, vol. 46, no. 4, 693–695.
Wiltermuth, S.S. & Heath, C. (2009): Synchrony and Cooperation. Psychological Science, vol. 20, no. 1.
First: Singing out of tune would be defecting on other people's community building practices, which is what I feared I might be doing by posting my comment in the first place. If a context loses the safety property and I can't fix the context, why on earth would I stick around clogging up other people's attempts at semi-random socially bonding? (Its not like I'm a seven year old being dragged to church against my will.) If a context works for others but seems bad to me, I can just exit the context rather than doing something to passive aggressively thwart it...
The reason I've brought this up here is that this community is notionally aimed at not being crazy, and I like the idea of a community of non-crazy people, and want to help with that project. My understanding is that I'm commenting in a way that advances the deep interests of the community, rather than injecting noise. If I'm wrong, that's worth knowing, but I don't think I'm wrong here.
More directly... did you understand the metaphor from computer security I was suggesting? If someone roots your server then one option is to format the drive and rebuild from scratch (after patching the security hole). Another is to do some kind of complicated sifting to filter the new malware out of your previously trustably valuable system... using external tools to handle the newly untrusted content safely, because the system itself has become potentially deeply unstrustworthy. Rebuilding from modified backups is vastly preferable in terms of time and efficiency.
However, it is a tragic fact about our souls, that they are currently implemented in a single piece of lipid and protein which can neither be backed up, nor restored, nor significantly manipulated by a separately secured exoself. As near as I can tell, in practice, all humans are regularly being hacked and mostly erased over and over again each day, with a small amount of stuff that "seems good" saved in long term storage. But much of what we think of as "our declarative selves" is, in some sense, just half-broken viral leftovers, especially (if you'll permit me to switch metaphors) if we don't cultivate our minds they way we'd cultivate a garden: planting things that are good, making sure it gets plenty of sunshine, regularly eliminating weeds, and generally practicing good husbandry. Ultimately, if you hope to do very much of significance with your mind, it will take months or years of intentional practice, information foraging, environmental selection, etc.
If someone's mind was already full of weeds then they could do much worse than to throw a bunch of random heirloom seeds from well cultivated minds into their own mind to see what happens. What have they got to lose? However, I suspect that my mind is less overrun with weeds than is normally the case, so I take a measure of care with it. It makes sense to me that some people here would be "seeking heirloom seeds" and some people here would be "careful mind gardeners".
For myself at this time, I'm more interested in "mental weeds as an object of study" because sometimes they sometimes have interesting features (especially related to survival characteristics like transmissible robustness) that are worth experimentally crossing with other thoughts to see if the results are better than what I started with, but this process is much much less haphazard than engaging in ecstatic dancing with people I don't know very well. If someone with a head full of weeds wanted to learn from me, it seems like teaching might be better than dancing :-P
A community building exercise that doesn't have a potential negative backlash would be one that induces justified trust in the benevolence and sanity of other members of the community, while revealing real expertise that can be shared or leveraged for community benefit. Such a process might eliminate people who didn't meet both criteria (benevolence and sanity) on some level or another. Conditioning on that kind of thing happening first, then... um... sure, break out some ecstatic dancing maybe? Preferably in smallish groups full of thoughtful people with multiple weak cross-links to other people in similar groups?
But if you're proposing a cultural process that accepts everyone, and gets everyone to believe whatever is in everyone else's heads at the beginning, that would trigger one of my heuristic detectors for mental malware. A novel meme-package that included content that induced such practices would probably spread faster than otherwise while picking up a bunch of parasitic elements in the process... to the detriment of the hosts.
I just lost a long response, because I was naive enough not to check if the "More Help" link in formatting was an in-tab link. It was. Hence a short answer (my self-allowed free-wheeling time is almost up)
First of all. Thank you for your more fulfilling answer.
First admission: In the bright light of hindsight I see that my reply was unnecessarily snide.
Second admission: Yes, I actually saw your first as being slightly noisy. Perhaps because the post on "Why Our Kind Can't Cooperate" was so fresh in my mind. Your post fit very well into ... (read more)