When Pain Feels Intentional

Source: PNW Production / Pexels

One of my all-time favorite studies in psychology is about pain. It’s an elegant experiment performed by Kurt Gray and Dan Wegner. They wrote: “When someone steps on your toe on purpose, it seems to hurt more than when the person does the same thing unintentionally.” In their research, they found that when people believe someone else has intentionally tried to make them suffer, they experience it as significantly more painful compared to when it seems by accident.

A Study on Pain

In the experiment, researchers introduced participants to an actor who pretended to be another participant. This actor would interact with participants from the next room using a computer. Then, the researchers hooked participants up to a machine that delivered mild electric shocks. But the participants would only receive an electric shock if the other person clicked a button on their computer screen. Sometimes, participants were told that the person was purposefully clicking the button to activate the electric shock (the intentional condition), but other times, participants were told that the person mistakenly clicked the button (the unintentional condition). After each shock was delivered, participants were asked to rate how uncomfortable it was on a 1-7 scale.

The researchers found that when participants believed that the other person intentionally clicked the button, they rated every shock they got as equally painful. But when participants believed that the other person clicked the button mistakenly, then they were less bothered by the shocks and rated them as significantly less painful.

The authors concluded that “the experience of pain changes depending upon the psychological context in which people are harmed.” In other words, it’s not just what happens to your body but what you believe is happening based on the social context. It all depends on how much you experience something as painful or whether you judge the other person’s actions as morally bad.

Gray followed up on this study in a second paper, in which he added a third condition to the electric shock experiment. In this version, some participants were given the same instructions as before (i.e., the other person clicked the button mistakenly or on purpose) and replicated the same result. However, a third group of participants were told that the other person intentionally clicked the button, but it was for a noble reason: to help them win money. That is, participants were told that the other person believed they would be given raffle tickets for each electric shock they got. When participants were told this, they rated the electric shocks as least bothersome compared to the other conditions. Even something objectively uncomfortable was rated as milder when people thought it was happening for the right reasons. Gray suggests that this phenomenon is explained by the idea that people experience pain as a response to “perceived malice.”

Learning From Intentions

Taken together, these results suggest a few key points. First, the same exact physical experience can produce very different emotional outcomes depending on what we believe is happening. This shows the power of our social minds. Second, we can see this playing out in all types of contexts. If someone accidentally bumps into you on the street, you’d probably be very polite and forgiving–but not so much if you think they did it on purpose. Third, there are a lot of implications based on this. We also have different legal and social consequences for people who intentionally break laws compared to people who don’t mean to. It’s also why we’re a lot more forgiving of young kids who aren’t old enough to understand truly right from wrong. We tolerate a lot of very painful behavior from them because we know they don’t really intend to be bad.

Now, that doesn’t necessarily mean that intentions are everything. Sometimes, people can be recklessly negligent. There are laws and norms against behaving in a careless way that ends up harming people. But even in a case like that, we still recognize that it is much different than a case of intentional wrongdoing. We still recognize the key difference between unintentional and deliberate actions.

It can also be difficult to keep this in mind. It’s challenging enough to deal with a very painful experience and even harder to consider people’s mental states in the midst of that. If you feel like someone else betrayed you, it can be challenging to remind yourself that wasn’t their intention. But this is absolutely essential for us to do, if for no other reason than maintaining our own mental health.

When something painful happens, we try to make sense of it, but that desire for sense-making can sometimes lead us astray. This is what leads people to engage in cognitive distortions, like mind-reading or personalizing. In a moment of extreme distress, you might think, “Wow, this is so painful; they must have done it to me on purpose.” But sometimes, terrible things are unintentional.

Social Life Essential Reads

3 Ways to Master the Art of Constructive Disagreement

Fishing for Compliments

I am concerned that we’ve forgotten this. During a recent workshop on teaching, I heard a colleague say that intentions are essentially meaningless and that we should only focus on the effects we have on people. What I think my colleague failed to realize is that this is a deeply unhealthy way of thinking. If we only focus on outcomes, we run the risk of making life a lot more painful than it needs to be.

Intentions Matter

Apropos of absolutely everything happening in the world right now, intentions matter. They matter in psychological and moral terms. They matter for how we organize society and how we resolve conflicts. Sometimes, it can be as simple as asking someone else what their true intentions are. You’d be surprised at how far a small gesture like that goes for your own mental health and the quality of your relationships. The next time you feel like someone hurt you, I suggest asking (with genuine curiosity) if they really meant to do that. You may end up feeling a lot of relief.