Social information creates self-fulfilling prophecies in judgments of pain, vicarious pain, and cognitive effort

Abstract

Expectations can shape perception and potentially lead to self-fulfilling prophecies such as placebo effects that persist or grow over time. Nonetheless, whether and how unreinforced and unconditioned social cues (i.e., suggestions about future experiences that have not been reinforced with reward or punishment) can create and sustain such effects is unknown. We conducted a set of experiments in which participants (N = 111) experienced stimuli eliciting somatic pain (heat), vicarious pain (videos of others in pain), and cognitive effort (a mental-rotation task), at three intensity levels each. Before each stimulus, participants viewed a social cue that ostensibly indicated ratings from 10 other participants but was in fact randomized to a high or low mean aversiveness level independent of actual stimulus intensity. Across all tasks, participants’ expectations and experience ratings shifted in line with the cues, with high-aversive cues leading to higher perceived aversiveness. Computational modeling and behavioral analysis revealed lower learning rates for prediction errors inconsistent with the trial’s cue value (e.g., better than expected for high-aversive cues) and higher learning rates for prediction errors consistent with the cue value (e.g., worse than expected for high-aversive cues). These findings reveal a confirmation bias in learning: people update more when outcomes align with expectations. Combined with expectation effects on perception, this bias helps sustain social cue effects. Together, these mechanisms show how social information can shape perception and learning, giving rise to self-fulfilling prophecies.