Bias in Healthcare: Pain Perception

Pain management is recognized as a fundamental human right, yet its assessment remains uneven across individuals. Understanding how others’ pain is perceived requires moving beyond a purely biological account: the biopsychosocial model shows that pain is also a relational experience, in which relatives and healthcare professionals play a central role in recognizing and responding to it.

A substantial body of research documents systematic disparities in pain evaluation depending on the social categories of the person expressing pain — notably race and sex — disparities that cannot be explained by biological differences in pain sensitivity. Instead, these inequalities reflect psychological and social processes, shaped by category-based expectations and heuristics.

This project aims to identify the developmental, social, and contextual mechanisms underlying these biases: when and how these inequalities in pain perception emerge, how they are shaped through socialization, and under which conditions they surface in clinical decision-making.