Shared Expectations Can Shape How Pain & Negative Experiences Feel
The sting of a needle, the ache of watching someone else suffer, even the mental fatigue of a challenging task – these experiences aren’t solely shaped by the physical reality of the moment. A new study from Dartmouth College suggests that what we expect to feel, based on what others tell us, can profoundly alter our own perception. Published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the research reveals how readily our experiences can be colored by social cues, creating a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy of pain, empathy, and effort.
How Social Information Alters Perception
The Dartmouth team, led by Aryan Yazdanpanah, a Guarini Ph.D. Candidate, explored how social information influences our judgments and learning. Participants in the study were subjected to a series of tasks designed to evoke negative experiences: a heat-based pain task, a vicarious pain task involving watching others in pain, and a cognitive effort task requiring mental rotation of 3D objects. Before each task, participants were shown dots on a screen, ostensibly representing the pain or effort levels reported by ten previous participants. Crucially, these dots were randomized and didn’t actually reflect the intensity of the stimulus the current participant would receive.
Despite the artificiality of the social cues, the researchers found a significant impact. When participants were led to believe others found an experience painful, they reported feeling more pain themselves, even when exposed to a low level of heat. This effect extended to vicarious pain – witnessing others’ suffering felt more intense when preceded by reports of high pain levels. Similarly, cognitive tasks were perceived as more mentally demanding when participants were told others found them challenging. This suggests that our brains aren’t simply registering sensory input, but actively integrating it with social information to construct our experience.
Confirmation Bias and the Persistence of Expectations
The study goes beyond simply demonstrating that social information influences perception; it too identifies the mechanisms driving this effect. Using behavioral analysis and computational modeling, the researchers pinpointed two key processes: confirmation bias in learning and the coloring of perception by expectation. “We found that a person will favor the evidence that aligns with their beliefs but will ignore or dampen those which do not align,” explains Alireza Soltani, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth. This means we’re more likely to notice and remember information that confirms our existing expectations, reinforcing the initial social cue.
This confirmation bias can create a feedback loop. If someone expects an activity to be painful, they may focus on sensations that confirm that expectation, even if the actual pain level is low. This heightened perception, in turn, strengthens the belief that the activity is painful, perpetuating the cycle. A similar dynamic plays out in chronic pain conditions. As Yazdanpanah notes, someone with chronic back pain who expects bending to cause pain may experience increased pain even when their body has physiologically healed, hindering recovery. The expectation itself becomes a barrier to updating beliefs and regaining function.
The Implications of a Hyperconnected World
In today’s world, where experiences are readily shared through social networks, these findings have significant implications. The study highlights how easily expectations can be shaped by the narratives we encounter online and through social interactions. This is particularly relevant when it comes to complex issues like climate change or energy transitions, where most people don’t directly experience the costs and benefits. As Kimberly Rose Clark, Ph.D. Points out in a LinkedIn post discussing the research, early social cues – whether accurate or not – can “lock in perceptions” and create resistance to factual information. If clean energy is consistently portrayed as costly or unreliable, for example, people may anticipate greater difficulty and risk in adopting it, even if those perceptions don’t align with reality.
This isn’t simply about individual perceptions; it has broader societal consequences. If a community believes a particular health intervention is ineffective, they may be less likely to participate, hindering public health efforts. Similarly, if people underestimate the risks of a public health threat, they may be less likely to take preventative measures. The Dartmouth study underscores the importance of carefully considering the social context in which information is presented and the potential for expectations to shape behavior.
Understanding the Dynamics of Belief and Behavior
Tor Wager, the Diana L. Taylor Distinguished Professor of Neuroscience at Dartmouth, emphasizes that the observed dynamics can create self-fulfilling prophecies, impacting a wide range of health conditions, including chronic pain and fatigue. The study’s findings reinforce the idea that shifting beliefs and behaviors isn’t just about providing more data or information; it’s about understanding how expectations, social context, and communication environments shape what people actually feel and learn.
The Dartmouth DIRECT Lab, where this research was conducted, focuses on these very processes, studying how expectations and social context influence perceptions of climate and energy issues. This work suggests that interventions aimed at changing beliefs and behaviors must address the underlying expectations and narratives that shape people’s experiences.
Further research is needed to explore the long-term effects of social information on perception and learning. The Dartmouth team plans to investigate how different types of social cues – such as the source of the information and the emotional tone – influence the strength and persistence of these effects. Understanding these nuances will be crucial for developing effective strategies to mitigate the negative consequences of biased expectations and promote more accurate and adaptive perceptions of the world around us.