Pain and sharing: A re-examination of the findings of Bastian, Jetten, and Ferris (2014)

Effects of Positive and Negative Experiences on Cooperative Behavior: The Role of Sharedness

Cooperation is a fundamental ingredient of society. However, research on the effects of positive and negative experiences on cooperation remain largely inconsistent. Therefore, through two experiments, the present study examined the effects of positive and negative experiences on cooperative behavior, and the moderation effect of sharedness on this relationship. In Study 1, we directly compared positive and negative experiences in the same context. Seventy-four students participated the experiment (M_age = 19.88, SD_age = 2.21). Results showed that participants reported higher levels of cooperative behavior in negative experiences than in positive experiences. In Study 2, we examined the moderation effect of sharedness on the relationship between positive/negative experiences and cooperative behavior. The result of the experiments involving 126 participants (M_age = 19.53, SD_age = 1.14) showed a significant interaction effect between positive/negative experiences and sharedness on cooperative behavior. Participants exhibited higher level of cooperative behavior in shared negative experiences than in shared positive experiences, while there were no significant differences in cooperative behavior between unshared negative and positive experiences. These results suggested that shared negative experiences could facilitate cooperative behavior.

Pain as Social Glue: A Preregistered Direct Replication of Experiment 2 of Bastian et al. (2014)

Bastian et al. (2014) found that sharing a painful experience promoted later intergroup cooperation. In Bastian et al.'s second experiment, 62 participants were assigned to groups of two to six people each. They performed either two painful or two painless tasks and then played an economic game. The present study consisted of two replications of the experiment: The first was a nonpreregistered pilot study (N = 153 students from the Czech Republic), and the second was a preregistered direct replication (N = 158 students from Slovakia). Important deviations from the original procedure were that (a) gender homogeneity of the small groups was balanced across the conditions and (b) the number of participants in each small group was fixed at three. No relevant effect of shared pain on cooperation emerged. The findings indicate that the true effect of shared pain on cooperation obtained in the original study may have been an overestimate or that the effect is not generally valid across various contexts.