Six ways humans bond. Which are you using in your team?

Robin Dunbar is the Oxford evolutionary psychologist who figured out how many people you can have a real relationship with. It's 150, give or take. That's the bit everyone remembers.

The more interesting bit is how we bond with them.

Primates bond by grooming each other. Picking through each other's fur. Lovely if you're a baboon. Less so at an all-hands.

As our groups got bigger, grooming couldn't keep up. You can only pick nits out of so many colleagues per day. So over a few million years, humans evolved six other ways to bond. All six trigger the brain's endorphin system, the same route as grooming. All six have been tested in peer-reviewed studies. All six still work.

Most teams aren’t using these to full effect.

Laughter

The oldest of the six mechanisms for bonding. We share it with great apes. It's involuntary, hard to fake, and triggers endorphins faster than almost anything else.

At work, it shows up in the meeting that started with a shared joke. The team that still quotes the one time Sarah said the wrong thing off-mute. The improv session that made everyone feel a bit awkward but ultimately tickled people pink.

Most corporate environments treat laughter as a sign that works not being done. The research suggests laughter has a serious impact - teams that laugh together perform better, feel connected and learn better to boot.

Singing

Before you click away: Dunbar doesn't mean karaoke. He means chorusing, voices in sync.

Sales floors used to ring a bell, they don't anymore because it felt "cheesy." Honestly, I am struggling to find examples of companies that truly embrace this one — although Google and the NHS do have choirs — I don’t imagine they’re oversubscribed.

I have seen teams being asked to write and perform songs at off-sites to great comedic effect. LinkedIn also invite new joiners to perform at their first All-Hands and have a talent show as part of their Global Sales Kick-Off. The more I explore the research on social bonding - the more I realise LinkedIn cracked a lot of these techniques.

Dancing

Synchronised movement. Any coordinated physical action where bodies move together.

Almost entirely absent from modern work. I imagine the holiday party is the only time it’s going to be an acceptable part of the mix - and as someone with two left feet - I won’t be advocating for it any further than that.

Feasting

Eating and drinking together. The one mechanism most workplaces still do.

The Pentland MIT sociometric badge research (worth a read if you haven't) found that who eats lunch with whom predicts team performance. Not who you work with, who you eat with.

Eating at your desk might feel like the right thing to do when you’re under pressure - but it’s unwise for your social wellbeing.

Storytelling

The only mechanism corporate culture has partially figured out. Which probably explains why every leadership book in the last ten years has had the word "story" in it.

At work, this is the origin story of the company that everyone actually knows. The war story from the launch that went sideways. The client story that gets told at every onboarding. Good storytelling creates shared reality, and shared reality is bonding.

Bad storytelling is the CEO reading off a slide about "our journey." You can feel the endorphins dying on the vine. Good storytelling is organic, authentic and not just top down.

Ritual

Repeated shared behaviour that signals belonging. The Monday stand-up that actually feels like something. The Friday wins channel. The way your team says goodbye to someone leaving. Onboarding done properly. Birthdays remembered and anniversaries acknowledged with genuine affection.

Most organisations think rituals are for start-ups and cults. They're actually a necessary way for humans to bond. The companies that keep their rituals have lower attrition. The ones that let them slide in the name of efficiency find out, usually too late, that efficiency was not what was holding the place together.

So what

We spend millions on engagement surveys asking why people feel disconnected.

The answer isn't another platform. It's not another policy. It's the oldest bonding system humans have, applied to a context it was never designed for but still works in. Put some of them back and you're not running a culture initiative, you’re building on how people already want to bond (even if they don’t realise it).

Try one this week. See what happens.

Robin Dunbar's full synthesis is in "Laughter and its role in the evolution of human social bonding," Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B, 2022. The earlier studies on each mechanism span two decades of peer-reviewed work on endorphin release and pain threshold as a proxy for bonding. All six are well-evidenced. None of them are new. Which is kind of the point.