Abstract
The development of closer ties between researchers and practitioners in the domain of behavior and behavioral change offers useful opportunities for better informing public policy campaigns via a deeper understanding of the psychological processes that operate in real-world decision-making. Here, we focus on the domain of social conformity, and suggest that the recent emergence of laboratory work using neuroscientific techniques to probe the brain basis of social influence can prove a useful source of data to better inform models of conformity. In particular, we argue that this work can have an important role to play in better understanding the specific mechanisms at work in social conformity, in both validating and extending current psychological theories of this process, and in assessing how behavioral change can take place as a result of exposure to the judgments of others. We conclude by outlining some promising future directions in this domain, and indicating how this research could potentially be usefully applied to policy issues.
Highlights
Recent innovative work in applied psychology has established that making people aware of the behavior of others is a useful technique for inducing positive behavioral change on a societal level
Though caution is warranted when using these types of reverse inference techniques to establish knowledge of precise cognitive processes (Poldrack, 2006), additional support for the hypothesis that social conformity can affect basic cognitive processing comes from electroencephalography (EEG) work showing that deviation from the norm of a peer group can impact early visual brain signals (Trautmann-Lengsfeld and Herrmann, 2013, 2014)
Does the discrepancy signal in the medial frontal cortex in response to a conflict between one’s own opinion and that of a group reflect the process of cognitive reappraisal and subsequent attitude adjustment, or rather does it indicate an increase in negative affect which in turn can motivate behavioral change? Other interpretations are possible, for example theories that medial frontal activity reflects recruitment of theory of mind processes (Gallagher and Frith, 2003), the experience of conflict (Pochon et al, 2002; Klucharev et al, 2009), or, more generally, a violation of expectations (Chang and Sanfey, 2013)
Summary
Recent innovative work in applied psychology has established that making people aware of the behavior of others is a useful technique for inducing positive behavioral change on a societal level. Campbell-Meiklejohn et al, 2010; Zaki et al, 2011; Huber et al, 2015), and to what brain mechanisms underlie longterm conformity, how the mere presence of peers impacts brain activity and leads to changes in risk-taking and trust decisions (Steinberg, 2007; Chein et al, 2011; Fareri et al, 2012, 2015), and how the brain reconciles misleading influence (Edelson et al, 2011, 2014; Izuma, 2013) The goal of this Focused Review is not to re-summarize this work, but rather to explore to what extent these neuroimaging studies can contribute to our understanding of the psychology of social influence, and what promising directions lie ahead in the future. This review is structured around three ways in which neuroimaging has been suggested to contribute to psychology (Moran and Zaki, 2013), namely the role of neuroimaging in (i) identifying the fundamental mechanisms that underlie behavior, (ii) dissociating between psychological theories that make similar behavioral predictions, and (iii) using brain activity to predict subsequent behavioral change
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