Other People's Opinions Can Shape How You Feel About Pain, Mental Challenges

March 16, 2026
Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter

You’re waiting for a vaccination. The person ahead of you stumbles out, groaning about how painful the shot was.

Could hearing that make your own injection hurt worse?

Yes, a new study says.

What others say about an experience – be it a vaccination, or a job interview, or a college course – can shape how it actually feels to you, researchers reported recently in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Others’ perceptions can help shape our own feelings in regards to either physical pain or mentally demanding tasks, researchers said.

"Our results suggest that when expectations are shaped by social information, people tend to hold onto those expectations which in turn impacts how we feel in a long-lasting way," lead researcher Aryan Yazdanpanah said in a news release. He’s a doctoral candidate in psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire.

Researchers reached this conclusion based on a series of lab experiments in which 111 participants rated tasks after being told how hard or painful the people ahead of them found them to be.

Participants were shown a series of 10 dots along a sliding scale and were told the dots represented how painful or mentally challenging the 10 previous participants had rated the activity.

However, the dots were just randomly generated, and had nothing to do with the task ahead.

After each dot cue, study participants then had to do one of three things:

Have heat applied to their arms
Watch a video of someone in pain
Compare two 3D objects and judge if they were identical

People tended to find the heat painful — even if they were receiving a low level of heat — if the dot array indicated that most others found it excruciating, the study found.

The same went for judging the pain of others – if the dot array indicated that those people were in severe pain, participants agreed.

“These findings have important implications for how people interpret others’ experiences,” Yazdanpanah said.

“For example, if a person is truly in severe pain but others believe that the pain is not serious, this social belief may lead you to underestimate or overlook that person’s suffering,” he said.

“Similarly, when others describe an activity such as solving math problems as highly effortful, people may experience the same task as more mentally demanding,” Yazdanpanah said.

Confirmation bias appears to be at play here, researchers said.

"We found that a person will favor the evidence that aligns with their beliefs but will ignore or dampen those which do not align," said researcher Alireza Soltani, an associate professor of psychological and brain sciences at Dartmouth.

These sort of biases can be difficult to update if perception is colored by expectations, researchers added.

“A person who has experienced back pain may expect that bending will cause pain," Yazdanpanah said. "Even if the body has physiologically healed and bending is safe, this expectation can increase the pain that is experienced. As a result, movements that are actually safe may still feel painful, weakening the very signal needed to update those beliefs.”

The study’s results could have major implications in today’s world, where perceptions are continually being shaped by social networks and media, researchers said.

"Our findings may offer insight into why expectations can persist even without evidence to support them," said senior researcher Tor Wager, a professor of neuroscience at Dartmouth.

"The dynamics we observed can create self-fulfilling prophecies – feedback cycles that affect many kinds of health conditions, including chronic pain and fatigue, as well as beliefs about other people,” Wager said.

More information

Northeastern University has more on confirmation bias.

SOURCE: Dartmouth College, news release, March 12, 2026

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