Will you see my pain?: examining the role of attention and motivation on racial bias in pain perception

Abstract

Racial bias in pain care is a prevalent issue within the US, with Black patients being undertreated for their pain. Previous research finds that visual perception plays a role in this bias, suggesting a novel route for potentially reducing this bias. In this work, we will test whether 1) directing visual attention to diagnostic regions of the face (Exps. 1-4) and 2) motivating individuation can reduce racial bias in pain perception (Exps. 5-8). To understand the role attention plays in pain recognition, and the bias therein, we first measured participants’ attention to different regions of the face in the context of pain (Exp. 1). We then implicitly and explicitly directed participants’ attention to specific face regions during a pain task (Exps. 2-4). We predicted that directing participants’ attention to pain-diagnostic regions of the face would result higher pain judgments for Black faces, thus reducing the racial gap. To understand the role individuation (or lack of) plays in pain recognition, participants made judgments regarding or learned unique information about targets (e.g., their names) to promote individuation prior to assessing pain and recommending pain relief (Exps. 5-6). In subsequent experiments, we provided participants with information about racial biases in social perception, both broadly and within the context of pain, to motivate them to individuate Black targets (Exps. 7-8). We predicted that promoting the individuation of Black faces would result in participants seeing their pain, and in turn, that recognizing pain on Black faces would promote higher recommendations of pain reliever. Together, this work provides insight into how attentional and motivational processes may be leveraged to reduce racial bias in pain care.