Social cues influence perception of others' pain

Accurately perceiving other people's pain is important in both daily life and healthcare settings. However, judging other's pain is inherently difficult and can be biased by various social and cultural factors. Here, we examined whether perception of others' pain and pain management recommendations are socially influenced by seeing the opinions of other raters.

In Experiment 1 (N = 50), participants rated pictures depicting injured hands or feet of pre-selected high, medium and low intensities. Each picture was preceded by cues indicating ratings of 10 previous participants. Cues were randomized to indicate low (Social_LOW) or high (Social_HIGH) pain judgements and were not predictive of actual normative pain intensity. In Experiment 2 (N = 209), participants viewed facial video clips of patients with chronic shoulder pain making painful movements. They estimated patients' pain intensity and provided pain management recommendations.

Experiment 1 revealed that perceivers' pain estimates were significantly and substantially higher for stimuli following Social_HIGH than Social_LOW cues (Cohen's d = 1.26, p < 0.001) and paralleled by increased skin conductance responses. Experiment 2 replicated the effect of social cues on pain judgements (d = 0.58, p < 0.001). However, social cues did not influence post-study pain management recommendations, potentially due to memory limitations.

Together, these studies reveal that judgements of others' pain are robustly modulated by information about others' opinions. Future research could test the prevalence and strength of such effects in clinical settings.

The present study shows that even arbitrary opinions of other raters influence the perception of others' pain. This finding adds new insight into the growing evidence of social and cultural biases in pain estimation.