I stopped at <i>"...little is known about the social effects of pain."</i> A long time ago I was reading Marine Corps training manuals at USC's Doheny Library (a friend was doing an endorphin study and the Marine's apparently had some some interesting work there) and I can tell you that they not only knew about the social effects of pain, they employed those effects in a variety of training exercises.
Their conclusion is a little too broad; they don't explore <i>why</i> this might be the case in their experiment. We don't know whether being subjected to pain makes one more cooperative, or whether observing a pain response causes one to be more empathetic and thus cooperative, or whether both are the case, or neither.<p>For example, studies show that physicians down-regulate their automatic empathetic response. Would physicians therefore not cooperate more? And those with sadistic personality disorder may receive a rewarding feeling from viewing others in pain, which would probably encourage the opposite of cooperation. There <i>could</i> be many cases where the conclusions don't work, but we don't know, because they didn't find out why it was happening.
Nothing new under the sun. It's the origin of all the hazing for freshmen or new military recruits, pain and shared humiliation creates stronger bonds. To overcome adversity you need better friends on who you can rely (trust), natural survival mechanism. War created awesome friendships through pain and worst life conditions ever. Idk about having studies presenting it legitimately but the results were pretty much known for a while.
PDF from the author's site: <a href="http://brockbastian.psy.unsw.edu.au/documents/Bastian%20et%20al%20Psych%20Science%202014.pdf" rel="nofollow">http://brockbastian.psy.unsw.edu.au/documents/Bastian%20et%2...</a>
Depends what kind of pain. For instance, the pain of manual testing and deployment, when they could have been avoided with bit of planning… just make me want to defect.