Felt Understanding and Misunderstanding Affect the Perception of Pain, Slant, and Distance

Abstract

We conducted two studies to examine whether the psychological states of felt understanding and misunderstanding would affect people’s basic perceptions such as pain, geographical slant, and distance. As predicted, an experimentally induced sense of felt understanding relative to misunderstanding increased pain tolerance marginally and reduced the perceived distance to the target locations significantly. In Study 2, we not only replicated Study 1’s findings on pain tolerance and distance perception but also found that participants in the understanding condition perceived the same hill to be significantly less steep than those in the misunderstanding condition. Our studies demonstrated that the experimentally induced feeling of misunderstanding tends to have the aversive effect on the perception of pain, geographical slant, and distance, whereas the experimentally induced feeling of understanding tends to alleviate pain, reduce the geographical slant, and the perceived distance to a target location.