Research: Can Your Friends Influence Your Pain Tolerance?

By Grant Frost · Physiotherapist • Last clinically reviewed: 27 September 2026

When we think about pain, it is natural to focus on the physical stimulus itself. How intense is it? Where is it coming from? How much tissue damage is involved?

But pain is a complex experience, and our response to painful stimuli can vary considerably between people. Genetics, previous experiences, psychological factors and the surrounding environment can all potentially contribute.

One particularly interesting question is whether our social environment might also be associated with how much pain we can tolerate.

A 2018 study published in the Scandinavian Journal of Pain investigated this question by examining pain tolerance and friendship networks among almost 1,000 adolescents in Norway. The results provide an intriguing insight into the social dimensions of pain, while also raising some important questions about what the findings actually mean.

What Did the Study Investigate?

The researchers wanted to know whether pain tolerance is associated with the people we choose to spend time with.

Previous research had suggested that genetics account for a substantial proportion of differences in pain tolerance between people. The researchers were interested in whether part of the remaining variation might be associated with our social environment.

To investigate this, they used data from the Tromsø Study: Fit Futures I, involving first-year students attending upper secondary school in the Tromsø area of Northern Norway.

• Participants: 997 adolescents.
• Social network: Students could nominate up to five people they had spent the most time with during the previous week.
• Primary outcome: Pain tolerance measured using a cold-pressor test.
• Additional measures: Heat-pain and pressure-pain tolerance were also assessed.
• Analysis: The researchers used social-network statistical methods to examine whether pain tolerance was associated between friends.

This is an important distinction from saying that the researchers simply compared pairs of "best friends". The social network was based on who participants reported spending the most time with, and each participant could nominate up to five people.

How Was Pain Tolerance Measured?

The primary pain-tolerance measure was the cold-pressor test.

Participants placed a hand in cold water and were asked to tolerate the stimulus for as long as they could. The researchers recorded how long they were able to tolerate it, up to a predefined maximum testing time of 105 seconds.

The study also included other experimental pain measures, including contact heat and pressure algometry. This allowed the researchers to investigate whether the relationship between friends extended beyond cold-induced pain.

What Did the Study Find?

The researchers found a positive association between the pain tolerance of individuals and the pain tolerance of their friends.

For the cold-pressor test, they estimated that for every 1-second increase in the average cold-pressor tolerance of a participant's friends, that participant's expected tolerance increased by approximately 0.21 seconds. This association remained statistically significant after accounting for sex and several other factors.

The researchers also found positive associations between friends for several of the other pain-tolerance measures. However, the results were not identical across every pain modality.

So the headline finding is not that "your friends determine how much pain you can tolerate." It's that people's pain tolerance tended to be more similar within friendship networks than would be expected by chance.

Why Was the Finding Strongest in Boys?

One of the more interesting findings emerged when the researchers analysed the results separately by sex.

The effect was found for male participants in relation to their male friends. This particular study did not detect the same statistically significant network effect in its female results.

The researchers discussed several possible explanations, including differences in social behaviour, peer influence and the possibility of a "macho" effect in which boys with higher pain tolerance may associate with, or influence, other boys with similar characteristics.

Why Might Friends Have Similar Pain Tolerance?

This is where the study becomes particularly interesting, because there are several possible explanations - although researchers could not determine which ones were responsible.

1. Social influence

Friends may influence each other's attitudes and behaviour around pain. People can observe how others respond to uncomfortable experiences, and social expectations may affect how willing they are to tolerate a painful stimulus.

2. People with similar characteristics may become friends

The opposite explanation is also possible. Rather than friends becoming similar because they influence each other, people who are already similar may be more likely to become friends.

This is sometimes referred to as homophily - the tendency for people to form relationships with others who share characteristics, behaviours or interests.

3. Shared lifestyle and other factors

Friends may also share aspects of their environment and lifestyle. Physical activity, smoking, alcohol use, socioeconomic circumstances and other characteristics could potentially be related to both friendship patterns and pain tolerance.

The researchers adjusted for some lifestyle factors, including smoking and physical activity, and the friendship association remained statistically significant. However, statistical adjustment cannot account for every possible unmeasured factor.

4. Peer pressure during testing

There was another particularly interesting factor: test order.

Students were tested consecutively, meaning some participants could potentially know how long other students had tolerated the cold-pressor stimulus. The researchers found that students tested later tended to have higher pain tolerance.

This suggests that peer pressure or competition may have influenced performance to some degree. However, even after accounting for test sequence, the friendship association remained statistically significant.

What Are the Study's Limitations?

The findings are interesting, but they need to be interpreted carefully.

• It was observational: The researchers observed associations within an existing social network. This means the study cannot establish that friendships caused changes in pain tolerance.
• The participants were adolescents: The study involved first-year upper secondary students in the Tromsø area. The findings should not automatically be assumed to apply to older adults or other populations.
• The friendship network was limited: Participants could nominate up to five people they had spent the most time with during the preceding week. These were not necessarily their five closest friends.
• The network was self-reported: The researchers relied on participants' reports of their social relationships.
• Friendships were not weighted: The analysis could not distinguish between particularly close relationships and weaker social connections.
• Experimental pain is not the same as clinical pain: A cold-pressor test provides a controlled experimental stimulus. It does not reproduce the complexity of persistent conditions such as chronic back pain, osteoarthritis or neuropathic pain.
• The direction of the relationship remains uncertain: Because the study did not have longitudinal information, the researchers could not determine how much of the observed similarity reflected social transmission versus people with similar characteristics becoming friends.

These limitations do not make the findings unimportant. They simply define what the study may and may not tell us.

What Does This Research Mean for Our Understanding of Pain?

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of this study is not the idea that your friends can directly change your pain tolerance. The more defensible takeaway is that pain tolerance appears to be associated with the social environment in which people live.

We often think about pain as something that happens between a stimulus and the body. This research adds another layer: the people around us may also be relevant.

The study does not show that simply spending time with someone who has a high pain tolerance will make you more pain tolerant. Nor does it show that having friends with low pain tolerance will make your pain worse.

Instead, it raises an interesting possibility that social relationships, shared behaviours and social expectations may form part of the broader environment in which our responses to pain develop.

Future research, particularly longitudinal studies, will be important for determining whether social relationships actually change pain tolerance or whether people with similar pain-related characteristics are simply more likely to form relationships.

The Bottom Line

A 2018 study involving 997 adolescents found that people tended to have similar pain tolerance to others within their friendship networks. The strongest network effect was observed among boys and their male friends.

But the study does not prove that friends cause each other's pain tolerance to change. Social influence, friendship selection and shared characteristics may all contribute, and the researchers could not determine how much each factor mattered.

What the research does provide is another reminder that pain is influenced by a complex combination of biological, psychological and social factors. Sometimes the people around us may be part of that story too.

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