social information creates self-fulfilling prophecies

What is it about?

This study asks how other people’s opinions shape how we experience negative emotion and how we learn from emotional stimuli. Using experimental tasks combined with a series of computational models, we found that social information influences both how we experience emotional stimuli and how we learn from them. Biases in learning towards others’ opinions can create self-fulfilling prophecies, in which initial expectations become self-reinforcing and create persistent emotional responses. In the experiment, participants experienced three kinds of emotional stimuli: Physical pain, observing others’ painful facial expressions, and a cognitively effortful mental rotation task. Before each stimulus, participants were shown social cues that they were told were ratings of the stimulus from 10 previous participants. These social cues were actually randomly generated and unrelated to the true intensity of the stimulus, but because participants believed they were real, they generated expectations that each upcoming event would be either highly negative or only mildly negative. These social cues systematically shifted both expectations and reported experiences in a persistent way. When the social cues indicated high pain or effort, participants reported greater pain or effort themselves. Comparisons across a series of computational models showed that instead of merely eliciting a bias in perceptual judgments, participants learned from emotional stimuli in ways that were biased by the social cues. Specifically, they disregarded evidence that was not aligned with their prior beliefs, demonstrating a confirmation bias in learning. This confirmation bias explained the persistent effects of social cues on people’s emotional experience. Both social cue effects on experience and confirmation biases varied across individuals, and these individual differences were moderately stable across domains. Thus, some individuals are particularly susceptible to biases induced by social information, and these biases can sometimes persist long-term.

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Photo by Etactics Inc on Unsplash

Photo by Etactics Inc on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Modern societies are deeply interconnected. We constantly encounter other people’s opinions — about health, performance, risk, and emotion. Yet we often assume that such information only influences what we say, not what we genuinely feel and how we learn from experience. Our findings challenge that assumption. They show that social information can shape subjective experience itself, not merely outward reports. Moreover, the biased learning process we observed suggests that socially shaped expectations may persist even in the face of contradictory evidence. These results may help explain how beliefs about pain, difficulty, or discomfort can become self-reinforcing over time. In health contexts, for example, social messages about how painful or debilitating something is could unintentionally amplify people’s experiences. Our findings also suggest that social information may influence how we perceive others’ suffering. If people are told that someone else’s pain is mild, they may perceive that person as being in less pain. Similarly, when people are told that a cognitive task is very difficult, they may experience it as more effortful, even when the task itself does not change. The idea that these suggestions can be self-reinforcing and thereby create persistent, long-term effects means that how we create and manage initial expectations, including those based on others’ opinions, is crucial.