Social Bonding Function of Art

In the AI Story

The function is tested against the alternative: cooperation without shared making-special. Groups that work together on strictly functional tasks develop some cooperation but limited bonding. The hours of rehearsal before a dance, the communal preparation of ritual regalia, the collective singing that transforms individuals into coordinated sound — these produce a different quality of cohesion, grounded in the mutual experience of effortful elaboration.

The mechanism has several components. Shared effort creates a sense of investment in the collective outcome. Mutual vulnerability (every participant risks failure or inadequate contribution) builds trust. Physiological synchrony (the alignment of heartbeats, breathing, and movement during coordinated activity) produces a sense of communion. Shared memory of the effortful process provides a common reference point that future interactions can draw on.

The AI-augmented workplace threatens the social bonding function not by attacking it directly but by removing the occasions on which it operates. When solitary productivity is sufficient, the team does not gather to build together. The communal effort is replaced by individual streams. The bonds that shared making-special would have built go unbuilt. The output may be superior; the cohesion is diminished.

Origin

The function is articulated most fully in Art and Intimacy and developed in Dissanayake's evolutionary aesthetic work. It draws on research in group dynamics, physiological synchrony, and ritual studies that converges on the finding that shared elaborative effort produces measurable bonding effects.

Key Ideas

Costly mutual investment. The bonds are built through the shared investment of effort that merely functional cooperation does not require.

Physiological synchrony. Coordinated activity in making-special contexts produces measurable alignment of bodily states across participants.

Persistent obligation. The bonds created through shared effort persist beyond the activity, sustaining cooperation under future pressure.

The preparation matters. Much of the bonding occurs in the collective preparation, not in the finished performance.

Optimization risk. Workflow optimization that eliminates communal making-special erodes the bonds that make organizations more than collections of production units.