Bastian, Jetten, and Ferris (2014) reported that shared pain enhances people’s bonding and cooperative behavior, but that shared no-pain has no such effect. They concluded that shared pain is a type of social glue that can improve people’s cooperation. However, in real life, both painful and painless experiences are often nonshared. Logically, the most direct way to determine whether sharing is the important element or not is to compare shared conditions with nonshared conditions. We conducted two experiments to investigate the relative effects of pain and sharing on enhancing people’s bonding and cooperative behavior by adding conditions of unshared pain and unshared no-pain. In experiment 1, we replicated Bastian, Jetten, and Ferris’s (2014) findings, and found that the effect of pain on bonding was mediated by empathy. In experiment 2, we used a 2 (pain/no-pain) × 2 (shared/unshared) design and found that while shared pain still induced more cooperative behavior than shared no-pain, unshared pain did not induce more cooperative behavior than unshared no-pain. Moreover, we found that empathy significantly mediated the relationship between pain and bonding when participants shared the experience. These results suggest that sharing is a necessary component for pain to act as social glue.

Bastian，Jetten和Ferris（2014年）报告说，共同的痛苦会增强人们的联系和合作行为，但共同的无痛苦并没有这种作用。他们得出结论，共同痛苦是可以改善人们合作能力的一种社会粘合剂。但是，在现实生活中，痛苦和无痛的经历通常是无法共享的。逻辑上，确定共享是否重要的​​最直接方法是将共享条件与非共享条件进行比较。我们进行了两个实验，通过添加非共享性疼痛和非共享性无痛条件来研究疼痛和共享对增强人们的联结和合作行为的相对影响。在实验1中，我们复制了Bastian，Jetten和Ferris（2014）的发现，并发现疼痛对结合的影响是由移情作用介导的。在实验2中，我们使用2（痛苦/无痛苦）×2（共享/不共享）设计，发现共享痛苦比无痛苦共享的合作行为更多，而无共享痛苦没有共享无痛苦的合作行为。此外，我们发现当参与者分享经验时，同理心能显着介导疼痛与粘接之间的关系。这些结果表明，分享是使痛苦成为社会粘合剂的必要组成部分。