Elsevier

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 58, Issue 3, 1 August 2005, Pages 245-253
Biological Psychiatry

Original article
Neurobiological Correlates of Social Conformity and Independence During Mental Rotation

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2005.04.012Get rights and content

Background

When individual judgment conflicts with a group, the individual will often conform his judgment to that of the group. Conformity might arise at an executive level of decision making, or it might arise because the social setting alters the individual’s perception of the world.

Methods

We used functional magnetic resonance imaging and a task of mental rotation in the context of peer pressure to investigate the neural basis of individualistic and conforming behavior in the face of wrong information.

Results

Conformity was associated with functional changes in an occipital-parietal network, especially when the wrong information originated from other people. Independence was associated with increased amygdala and caudate activity, findings consistent with the assumptions of social norm theory about the behavioral saliency of standing alone.

Conclusions

These findings provide the first biological evidence for the involvement of perceptual and emotional processes during social conformity.

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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