Racial bias in sport medical staff’s perceptions of others’ pain

ABSTRACT

Unequal treatment based on race is well documented in higher education and healthcare settings. In the present work, we examine racial bias at the intersection of these domains: racial bias in pain-related perceptions among National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) Division 1 sport medical staff. Using experimental vignettes about a student-athlete who injured his/her anterior cruciate ligament (ACL), we find, like prior work, that respondents perceived Black (vs. White) targets as having higher initial pain tolerance. Moreover, this bias was mediated by perceptions of social class. We extend prior work by showing racial bias was not evident on other outcome measures, including perception of recovery process pain, likelihood of over-reporting pain, and over-use of drugs to combat pain. This suggests stricter boundary conditions on bias in pain perceptions than had been previously recognized.

KEYWORDS:

• Pain perceptions
• racial bias
• social class
• sports psychology

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Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/ETM4LW

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi:10.7910/DVN/ETM4LW

Acknowledgments

We thank David Figlio, Alexander Green, Adam Howat, Kevan Ketterling, and Jennifer Richeson for their helpful advice.

Supplemental data

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s Web site.

Notes

1. All materials necessary to reproduce this experiment are provided in the Supplemental Appendices online and at Harvard Dataverse: doi:10.7910/DVN/ETM4LW.

2. All data and codes necessary to reproduce our analyses are available at Harvard Dataverse: doi:10.7910/DVN/ETM4LW.

3. Since we control for how much pain the respondent believes the injury would cause him or her, the model for the two pain perceptions ratings is an ANCOVA. For the other two outcomes, the model is an ANOVA.

4. For clarity, in presenting all the results, we do not report details on every main effect, or 2- and 3-way interactions, but instead we report the significant effects and a summary of the non-significant effects.

5. Data suggest injury rates among soccer and basketball players are similar (although women soccer players are injured more).Generally then, there is no reason to suspect basketball players have lower tolerance due to fewer injury experiences (see Roos et al., 2017; Zuckerman et al., N.d.).