Electrophysiological precursors of social conformity

Abstract

Humans often change their beliefs or behavior due to the behavior or opinions of others. This study explored, with the use of human event-related potentials (ERPs), whether social conformity is based on a general performance-monitoring mechanism. We tested the hypothesis that conflicts with a normative group opinion evoke a feedback-related negativity (FRN) often associated with performance monitoring and subsequent adjustment of behavior. The experimental results show that individual judgments of facial attractiveness were adjusted in line with a normative group opinion. A mismatch between individual and group opinions triggered a frontocentral negative deflection with the maximum at 200 ms, similar to FRN. Overall, a conflict with a normative group opinion triggered a cascade of neuronal responses: from an earlier FRN response reflecting a conflict with the normative opinion to a later ERP component (peaking at 380 ms) reflecting a conforming behavioral adjustment. These results add to the growing literature on neuronal mechanisms of social influence by disentangling the conflict-monitoring signal in response to the perceived violation of social norms and the neural signal of a conforming behavioral adjustment.

MEG Signatures of a Perceived Match or Mismatch between Individual and Group Opinions

“…The stimuli were taken from free Internet sources. The same set of stimuli was used previously in Klucharev et al (2009) and Shestakova et al (2013). …”

“…This signal presumably guides the selection of future actions by updating expectations about action values. These findings suggest social conformity may be based on general action-monitoring and reinforcement-learning mechanisms (Klucharev et al, 2009, 2011; Shestakova et al, 2013). …”

“…Two electroencephalographic (EEG) studies (Kim et al, 2012; Shestakova et al, 2013) demonstrated that a mismatch between an individual opinion and the opinion of a group elicits feedback-related negativity (FRN), a frontally distributed negative polarity event-related brain potential (ERP) component associated with outcome evaluation and behavioral adaptation (see Walsh and Anderson, 2012, for a review). FRN amplitude is greater whenever the outcome of an action is worse than expected.…”

“…FRN amplitude is greater whenever the outcome of an action is worse than expected. It was argued thus that similar to other negative outcomes, the perceived mismatch between the individual and group opinions may activate the generic outcome-evaluation mechanism in the MPFC (Shestakova et al, 2013). Evidence supporting this hypothesis comes from the fact that the evoked response to an opinion discrepancy highly resembled FRN in terms of latency and scalp topographies.…”

Neurociência social: novas abordagens para a gestão das relações públicas e das comunicações

“…To gather information from those in one's social group and integrate them as their own, it requires social information tracking, and cognitive control, both of which are associated with medial prefrontal cortex activation (Cascio, Dal Cin & Falk, 2013). Activation of the reward system promotes conformity through positive reinforce via ventral striatum and medial orbitofrontal cortex activation, which can be observed by both fMRI and EEG (Shestakova et al, 2013). Activation of the ventral medial prefrontal cortex can reflect a shift from outwardly presenting compliance with particular attitudes to personally accepting them (Izuma, 2013).…”