14 DAY TRIAL // Recent psychological analysis revealed, to the amazement of scientists, that the human mind perceives a hit or injury as being more painful if the person who caused it did it on purpose. That may be the case if we stop for a moment and think about silly house accidents that inevitably take place when there's more than one person living there. Whenever we are injured by mistake, we can move past it with relative ease, which doesn't seem to be the case with deliberate injuries.
Undoubtedly, there are more factors involved in experiencing pain than the simple stimulus that causes it. That is to say, if you were to know that someone you cared about hit you on purpose, and for no reason, wouldn't there be other feelings involved too, besides the actual pain? Things like disappointment, anger, disgust, and so on? Frustration and disappointment are also factors that trigger pain, but at the level of the mind, and not the body. But when the two are coupled together, the end result is a higher degree of pain.
Researchers at Harvard, led by Kurt Gray, a graduate student, and Daniel M. Wegner, a psychology professor, wanted to put this assumption to the test, and selected 40 volunteers for their experiments, which consisted of splitting the participants in two groups and separating them in different rooms. A part of the study was a procedure called “discomfort assessment,” test subjects receiving a harmless electric jolt to the wrist.
If one of the participants in one room was told that another one, in the other room, triggered the electric jolt on purpose, then he or she would asses, at the end of the experiment, that the pain they received was much stronger than that they experienced when they were told that the computer selected them to receive the jolt randomly. Data collected from the electric device showed that the intensity of the current remained constant throughout the tests.
So, pain is indeed completely subjective, the researchers conclude. Maybe that's why some people can tolerate pain better than others, and can learn to do so even more. And the amount of pain required to stop, let's say, an average man in a fight, is not nearly enough to stop a trained wrestler. The two scientists say that further research is required, with a larger batch of test subjects, in order for them to understand the complicated nature of inflicting and experiencing pain.