Original articleNeurobiological Correlates of Social Conformity and Independence During Mental Rotation
Section snippets
Participants
Participants were 33 normal, right-handed volunteers (14 female, 19 male), with a mean (SD) age of 26.0 (5.8) years (range, 19–41 years). An additional two participants were studied but were excluded from the analysis because debriefing indicated that they did not understand the task. One participant had an artifact on her functional brain images and was discarded from the analysis, leaving a total of 32 participants. All participants gave written informed consent to a protocol approved by the
Behavioral Measures of Conformity
Conformity was defined as agreeing with the exogenous source of information, either peers or computers, when the information was wrong. Conformity was measured behaviorally by the change in error rates of the participants between their baseline performance and the conditions in which exogenous information was presented (Figure 2). The baseline error rate was computed for each participant from the trials in which no group (or computer) information was given (mean 13.8%, SEM 2%). The error rate
Discussion
We are interested here in the potency of social pressure in inducing conformity and how information that originates from humans, versus inanimate sources, alters either perception or decision making and the neural basis for such changes. When participants conformed to the judgments of a group of peers, relative to nonhuman sources, activity within the brain network that normally accomplishes the task of mental rotation was altered. These findings indicate that with mental rotation, the effects
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