A certain spouse of our acquaintance has what we
can only assume are religious objections to walking over to a wastepaper
basket and dropping in his used Kleenex, crumpled envelope or other
trash. Instead, he shoots what amount to living-room foul
shots—occasionally hitting someone between him and the basket. This
spouse has also been known—rarely!—to throw crumpled paper in anger,
intentionally hitting someone. Question: why does it hurt more when he
tries to hit you than when he hits you unintentionally? Related
question: why does it hurt more if someone purposely stomps on your foot
than if she accidentally treads on your toes? Now Kurt Gray and Daniel M. Wegner
of Harvard University have shown it’s not your imagination, or a case
of hurt feelings being confused with a physical harm. As they write
about “the sting of intentional pain” in the December issue of the
journal Psychological Science,
“the physical parameters of the harm may not differ—your toe is
flattened in both cases,” but the intentional infliction of pain is,
well, more painful. Psychologists have known for years that pain has a strong mental
component. The placebo effect (being given a sugar pill or other dummy
treatment that a respected authority assures will help you) is
especially potent at reducing pain, and the nocebo effect (being told
you are about to feel something painful, even though nothing physical is
actually administered) can cause pain: when told that a (nonexistent)
electric current is passing through their heads, people say they get
headaches, as a fascinating 1981 paper found. For their study, the Harvard scientists paired 43 volunteers with
partners (actually, one of the research assistants). The partner, they
were told, would decide whether the volunteer would receive an electric
shock or not. Sometimes, however, the experimental set-up would deliver a
shock even when the partner had called for something else, the
volunteers were told. The volunteer could see what the partner had
called for and what was actually going to happen. That is, they could
tell if the partner meant to cause the volunteer to feel an electric
shock (intentional) or if the shock occurred because of a mix-up
(unintentional). On a scale from 1 to 7, intended pain hurt 3.62 worth. An identical
shock, which the volunteers thought was unintentional, hurt 3.00 worth. Why? One clue comes from the finding that, in the brain, feelings of
physical pain and social harm (such as being rejected) are processed by
similar regions, as a 2003 study found. Social harms are, typically, intentional, and are more painful to relive than physical harms.
If you combine physical pain (electric shock—or getting hit with a
wadded-up Kleenex) with social pain (he meant to hit me!), the
combination is that much more hurtful. So if she tries to tell you that that little intentional stomp she gave your foot can't have hurt, or if he insists that a little bop on the head from the paper he hurled at you cannot have been painful, tell them science says otherwise. |