Beyond conformity: Social influences on pain reports and physiology.
Open accessAbstract
Social information can profoundly influence behavior, but its effects are often explained in terms of "conformity," implying effects on decision-making and communication rather than deeper sensory modulation. We examined whether information about other people's pain reports affected both participants' pain experience and skin conductance responses (SCR) during pain. Sixty volunteers experienced painful heat stimulation preceded by 2 kinds of informational cues: (a) nonreinforced social information indicating low or high pain ratings from previous participants; and (b) reinforced conditioned stimuli (CSlow, CShigh). Both high-pain social information and CShigh cues enhanced pain and SCRs relative to their respective controls, with particularly robust effects of social information. Effects of both manipulations on both pain and SCRs were mediated by trial-by-trial pain expectancies. These results demonstrate strong social influences on pain and autonomic responses, and suggest that expectations from multiple sources can influence pain physiology independent of reinforcement.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Decades of conformity experiments demonstrate that individuals' behaviors, preferences, and beliefs can be swayed by their peers in domains as wide-ranging as visual perception, inferences about socially normative behaviors, intensity of pain experience, preferences for food and music, and the attractiveness of faces.
“Decades of conformity experiments demonstrate that individuals’ behaviors, preferences, and beliefs can be swayed by their peers in domains as wide-ranging as visual perception, inferences about socially normative behaviors, intensity of pain experience, preferences for food and music, and the attractiveness of faces 1 – 7 .”
From Crowdsourcing punishment: Individuals reference group preferences to inform their own punitive decisions (2019) · cites this paper as [3]
Some studies indicate that minimal, unreinforced, and unconditioned social cues can influence autonomic physiological responses.
“In addition, some studies indicate that minimal, unreinforced, and unconditioned social cues can influence autonomic physiological responses (29, 30).”
From Social information creates self-fulfilling prophecies in judgments of pain, vicarious pain, and cognitive effort (2026) · cites this paper as [29]
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
The citation lists haven’t been fetched yet
References 55 · Cited by 92
Research works printed but not linked: 1
- Koban Leonie Ruzic Luka Wager Tor D Colloca L Flaten MA Meissner K Brain Predictors of Individual Differences in Placebo Responding Placebo and Pain: From Bench to Bedside 2013 San Diego Academic Press 89 102
- Authors
- Koban, L., & Wager, T. D.
- Affiliations
- University of Colorado Boulder (US)
- Venue
- Emotion
- Published
- 2016-02
- Volume
- 16
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 24-32
- ISSN
- 1528-3542 (ISSN-L)
- 1931-1516
- PMC
- PMC4718820
- OpenAlex
- W2410157437
- Cited by
- 92
- References
- 55
- Citations by year
- 2026: 11 · 2025: 7 · 2024: 5 · 2023: 14 · 2022: 6 · 2021: 7 · 2020: 4 · 2019: 10 · 2018: 10 · 2017: 11 · 2016: 4 · 2015: 2 · 2014: 1
- FWCI
- 5.41
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Locations
- Emotion (publishedVersion, other-oa)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- Funders
- Swiss National Science Foundation (PBGEP1-142252)
- National Institutes of Health (R01DA035484 and R01MH076136)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Pain Management and Placebo Effect
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Physiology › Pain Mechanisms and Treatments
- Health Sciences › Medicine › Pediatrics, Perinatology and Child Health › Pediatric Pain Management Techniques
- Keywords
- pain reports, skin conductance response, pain anticipation, informational cues, conditioned stimulus, reinforcement, pain physiology, autonomic responses, conformity, thermal pain
- MeSH terms
- Adolescent, Adult, Autonomic Nervous System, Conditioning, Psychological, Cues, Decision Making, Female, Galvanic Skin Response, Humans, Male, Middle Aged, Pain, Social Behavior, Young Adult
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
