#group cohesion

Why Bullies Need a Hated Enemy to Be Against

fists, togetherness, perform, citizens, collaboration, protest, strike, protesting, common, action, crowd, unite, unify, gather, group, help, illustration, up, vote, volunteer, human, raised, voting, person, people, upwards, election, concept, collection, meeting, together, teamwork, palm, participation, partnership, society, raised hands, team, gesture, success, united, solidarity, policy,…

Why Bullies Often Bully in Large Groups

As the old proverb goes, “Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups”. This has been true since the dawn of time. There’s strength in numbers. And bullies are notorious for running in packs and using their numbers to intimidate targets.

However, there’s a reason that goes much deeper than strength or power.

Social science has proved that comradeship is born when two or more…

Auden, Despair, Picnics, and, “Build that Wall!!”

W.H. Auden is probably the poet I quote most often here. The story of his life and his beautiful poetry has been a great inspiration because it encourages us to look beneath the surface of things and find that the effort is worth the pain of the process. The first step in this process is to recognize there is a “surface of things,” an insight which in itself is challenging; for any culture…

Experts speculate that the widespread tradition could stem from a host of motivations, not the least beauty. The latest hypothesis to join the list, however, is the belief that skull shaping could have been a boon for survival to some who practiced it, as proposed by Marta Alfonso-Durruty, an anthropologist at Kansas State University, and colleagues in a new research paper published in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology.

The team examined 60 skulls from a group of hunter-gatherers that lived in Southern Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego 2,000 years ago, Hogenboom writes. Thirty percent of the skulls showed signs of intentional deformation, the first evidence that people in Patagonia practiced such modification, which could have become widespread because, like tribal tattoos or team jerseys, it promoted group cohesion. Unlike clothing, however, body modification permanently differentiates in-group members from outsiders.

In Patagonia however, the hunter gatherers with modified skulls lived in more diffuse groups, created by the need to move from place to place in search off food in a resource-scarce region. Building relationships with individuals to gain access to certain areas would have been valuable. Modified skulls could have served that purpose, signaling a trusted, connected person. Hogenboom elaborates:

[H]aving an oddly-shaped skull proved they had acquired information on how to do so from another trusted group. "It was a social strategy that allowed individuals to access resources, that were at times unpredictable, across a large territory," Alfonso-Durruty says.

The practice has also extended into modern times. In a region of Western France, people were still binding the heads of their children in the early 1900s. The practice, called bandeau, was thought to protect the infants from accidents and may or may not have been intentionally creating the altered head shape that experts called the "Toulouse Deformity." Chris White reports for Atlas Obscura that people in Russia, Scandinavia and the Caucasus also practiced cranial deformation at that time. Today, some groups in Polynesia as well as the people of the Mangbetu tribe in Congo still sometimes elongate their children’s heads.

For the first time, evidence has been collected that suggests humans are not the only primates who whisper.

"Increasing evidence of whisper-like behavior in non-human species suggests that such low amplitude signaling may represent a convergence in a communication strategy amongst highly social and cooperative species."

Block early and block often. That's how you create a healthy community. Communities that don't exclude anyone or anything eventually lose cohesion and fall apart. It's hard to maintain a sense of shared purpose if you tolerate members who have divergent or antagonistic goals.

There are an infinite number of possible goals. By choosing one goal you end up excluding an infinity of others. However there will always be people who spend their energy on changing the goal of the community rather than achieving the current goal. Unfortunately time spent fighting over goals or bikeshedding is time stolen from achieving the community's goal.

This doesn't mean that conformity or homophily are the only ways for a community to achieve its goal. However it does require us to accept that one of the challenges in trying to build a generative community is deciding which dimensions of diversity are helpful and which are unhelpful. Whilst you want a diverse range of perspectives you don't want perspectives that amount to "let's just shut down this project."

Instead you want constructive disagreements and the kind of conflict where everybody involved is dedicated to making progress rather than just winning the argument. This means having passionate fights about how you're going to achieve your goals whilst still agreeing on your goals. That unity of purpose is what allows the people who lost today's argument to come back tomorrow to make valuable contributions.

But that means having community members who accept that losing an argument doesn't meant they have to leave the community. At the same time they have to be able to accept that a particular argument is settled and move on to the next argument. This ability for members to disagree but remain committed to the community's goal is one of the hallmarks of a generative community.

One of the skills that have been covered this semester was the partaking in and running of growth games. A fancy name for team building exercises, I would say, growth games are a cool tool to help build group cohesion, help people realize their true potential and recognize their weaknesses. And, of course, it is great fun!