Electrophysiological precursors of social conformity

Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. 2013. Vol. 8. No. 7. P. 756–763.

Shestakova A., Rieskamp J., Tugin S., Krutitskaya J., Klucharev V., Ossadtchi A.

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.

Keywords: конформность, conformity, социальное влияние, social influence, feedback-related negativity (FRN), medial frontal cortex, reinforcement learning

Publication based on the results of: Neurocognitive mechanisms of decision making and social influence (2014)