Trial reportProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2016
Racial bias in pain assessment and treatment recommendations, and false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites.
Trial report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2016. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 827 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
827 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- The Perpetual Cycle of Racial Bias in Healthcare and Healthcare Education: A Systematic Review.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2026Pooled it
- Examining the Impact of the Syndemic on Black Birthing Individuals in the USA: a Systematic Review.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2026Pooled it
- Racial and Ethnic Disparities in the Incidence and Prevalence of Low Back Pain in the United States: A Systematic Review.Arthritis care & research · 2026Pooled it
- Trial
- Learning to Unveil: Tackling Implicit Bias in Pain Recognition Through Education.European journal of pain (London, England) · 2026Trial
- Trial
- Learning from Misses: Evaluating a Clinical Decision Support for Chronic Pain Management in Primary Care.Applied clinical informatics · 2025Trial
- Racial Differences in Symptom Burden and Endocrine Therapy Adherence in Breast Cancer: A Post Hoc Analysis of a Randomized Trial.Journal of the National Comprehensive Cancer Network : JNCCN · 2025Trial
- Implicit Racial Bias in Evaluation of Neonatal Opioid Withdrawal Syndrome.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2025Trial
- Inaudible and invisible: epistemic injustice and the failure of recognition as a single intersubjective relation. Pain as particularly illuminating case.Medicine, health care, and philosophy · 2026Article
- Racial/Ethnic and Regional Disparities in Opioid-Involved Overdose Deaths among Children and Adolescents in the United States.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2026Article
- Migraine-Related Burden, Treatment Interventions, and Healthcare Experiences by Race and Ethnicity: Results of the Migraine Report Card Survey.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2026Article
- Temporal pathways between alexithymia, psychological distress, and pain: An autoregressive mediation analysis.Health psychology : official journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association · 2026Article
- "I Will Never Be Enough Because My Skin Color Isn't Right": Structural Racism and Healthcare Access Following Nonfatal Strangulation Among Black Women Survivors of Intimate Partner Violence.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- The impact of ethnicity information in single best answer questions on student performance, item response time and psychometric properties.Advances in health sciences education : theory and practice · 2026Article
- Using culturally responsive and sustaining course design to increase retention of underrepresented STEM undergraduates.Journal of microbiology & biology education · 2026Article
- Reducing Racial Disparities in Stroke Thrombolysis Using Fairness-Aware Machine Learning.Journal of racial and ethnic health disparities · 2026Article
- Equity in Neurotoxicity Care in the Era of Cancer Immunotherapy.Seminars in neurology · 2026Article
- Biobehavioral pain profiling of minoritized adults with chronic widespread pain and clinical obesity before and after bariatric surgery: study protocol for a longitudinal, observational cohort study.medRxiv : the preprint server for health sciences · 2026Article
- Immigrant and Mistrust in the Healthcare Setting: A Thematic Review.Journal of immigrant and minority health · 2026Review
767 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Black Americans are systematically undertreated for pain relative to white Americans. We examine whether this racial bias is related to false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites (e.g., "black people's skin is thicker than white people's skin"). Study 1 documented these beliefs among white laypersons and revealed that participants who more strongly endorsed false beliefs about biological differences reported lower pain ratings for a black (vs. white) target. Study 2 extended these findings to the medical context and found that half of a sample of white medical students and residents endorsed these beliefs. Moreover, participants who endorsed these beliefs rated the black (vs. white) patient's pain as lower and made less accurate treatment recommendations. Participants who did not endorse these beliefs rated the black (vs. white) patient's pain as higher, but showed no bias in treatment recommendations. These findings suggest that individuals with at least some medical training hold and may use false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites to inform medical judgments, which may contribute to racial disparities in pain assessment and treatment.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.