Last updated: Fri, Sep 13, 2024
The beliefs in this section, which I've labeled "folk or cultural," are beliefs that are transmitted and reaffirmed in a social context. I've described some of these beliefs and touched on some of the reasons that these beliefs are accepted and transmitted.
In general, these beliefs are non-scientific, even though they may have originated in scientific findings. There are no very good mechanisms available that might ensure that widely-held beliefs are realistic. The nearest thing we have to that is our educational institutions. The curricula in these institutions is highly politicized, and notions that are supported by scientific evidence have no automatic preference or entree.
Many popular beliefs about pain are actually about status, group identity, and deservingness. As Wailoo noted, in the 1960s, "scientists speculated that average people acquired their pain tolerance from parental conditioning. Critics of the loosening of social mores wondered whether 'permissive' parenting...laid the groundwork for indulgence and adolescent complaint."1. Such ideas enter popular awareness through press reports, and very few people ever follow up such notions by actually evaluating the science.
Reagan's "welfare queens" and the dissembling disabled live in the minds of Reagan fans independently of their existence in the real world. They are what sociologists call "social facts," true because people are willing to treat them as true.2 Such ideas are also abstractions, in that they apply to groups of people rather than individuals. Welfare queens and dissemblers exist if even one exemplar can be found. Since they are camouflaged, their number is unknown.
Beliefs that link pain to race, socio-economic status, and other features that define group membership (that is, in the eyes of those who are defining other groups) tend to signal membership in the group that is doing the defining. They thus become signs of membership in the defining group. Such dogmatic beliefs, whether official or not, are highly resistant to scientific arguments.