Social information creates self-fulfilling prophecies in judgments of pain, vicarious pain, and cognitive effort
Aryan Yazdanpanah, Heejung Jung, Alireza Soltani, and Tor D. Wager
Feb. 2026
Significance
Today’s societies have become deeply intertwined through unprecedented connectivity and information exchange. Although social information can benefit decision-making at both the personal and policy levels, it also adversely impacts behavior via bias and misinformation. But can social information even when not reinforced by real stimuli produce lasting changes in our fundamental perceptual judgments? Here, we show that others’ opinions can strongly bias experiences of pain, empathy, and cognitive effort, creating beliefs resistant to corrective evidence. These biases arise through confirmation bias in learning, where individuals learn less from evidence that contradicts prior beliefs. These findings reveal how social information can shape perception and learning, with implications for how beliefs form and persist in our hyperconnected age.
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.
CITE
A. Yazdanpanah, H. Jung, A. Soltani, & T.D. Wager, Social information creates self-fulfilling prophecies in judgments of pain, vicarious pain, and cognitive effort, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 123 (7) e2513856123, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2513856123 (2026).
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