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.
"Rigged" was a bad choice of word on my part, since it suggests intentional manipulation, and as I've already written, I'm not suggesting anything like that in Haidt's case. Rather, it's a matter of deeply internalized biases. More specifically, the problem is that with enough motivation, almost anything can be rationalized in terms of harm and fairness, and people whose favored ideology emphasizes these elements are likely to invent such rationalizations for their own specific norms of purity, sacredness, group loyalty, and authority. Haidt's approach ends up heavily biased because it correctly recognizes these latter elements in those cases where they are more or less explicit (which happen to be mostly on the political right), while at the same time failing to uncover them when they exist under a veneer of rationalizations in terms of harm and fairness.
Now, the concrete examples of leftist purity manifested in nutritionist and environmentalist ways are recognized by Haidt, as another commenter has already noted. (Though, in my opinion, he is certainly biased in underplaying their overall importance.) However, I believe there are other examples that illustrate the problem even better.
Take for example the norms about sexual matters. One puzzle I've always found fascinating is why, for modern liberals, support for laissez-faire in matters of sex is so strikingly correlated with opposition to laissez-faire in economic matters and support for paternalistic government regulation in pretty much everything else. After all, most of the standard arguments of liberals against economic laissez-faire and in favor of government paternalism hold just as well for sexual matters. (Arguably, they are even stronger in the latter case -- just consider how much it involves in terms of zero- and negative-sum games, tremendous inequalities, common patterns of irrational behavior, health concerns, discrimination across protected categories, etc., etc.) Yet an attempt to apply these arguments to sex immediately triggers a strong negative reaction that can't be justified by any reasonable argument based on harm or fairness.
From this, it seems pretty clear that modern liberalism incorporates a strong element of sacredness associated with individual autonomy in matters of sex. This, of course, is nothing very surprising, considering that strong norms of sacredness regulating sex are a human universal. Yet even if he had a perfectly unbiased view of the matter, how could Haidt possibly reveal this element in his questionnaires without violating the associated norms of sacredness as they apply to the public discourse about sex-related topics?
Another fascinating topic is the peculiar way in which in-group morality is commonly manifested on the left. What I have in mind is the phenomenon that was discussed recently on LW in a thread about Orwell's essay "Notes on Nationalism," which Orwell termed "transferred nationalism." See this subthread, in which I made some points whose relevance in this context should be clear. Again, this is something highly relevant in the real world, whose discussion however requires much more subtlety and de-biasing than anything within the reach of Haidt's questionnaires.
I'd like to elaborate on some examples of authority norms that are common on the left too, but right now I'm short on time. I'll get back to it if this thread remains active in the next few days.
I'm definitely interested in what you want to say on the subject.
It looks to me as though a lot of people internalize age of consent laws as sacred.
More generally, does Haidt address sacredness in re patriotism and/or law-abidingness?