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Brain Systems Underlying Fundamental Motivations of Human Social Conformity

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Abstract

From birth to adulthood, we often align our behaviors, attitudes, and opinions with a majority, a phenomenon known as social conformity. A seminal framework has proposed that conformity behaviors are mainly driven by three fundamental motives: a desire to gain more information to be accurate, to obtain social approval from others, and to maintain a favorable self-concept. Despite extensive interest in neuroimaging investigation of social conformity, the relationship between brain systems and these fundamental motivations has yet to be established. Here, we reviewed brain imaging findings of social conformity with a componential framework, aiming to reveal the neuropsychological substrates underlying different conformity motivations. First, information-seeking engages the evaluation of social information, information integration, and modification of task-related activity, corresponding to brain networks implicated in reward, cognitive control, and tasks at hand. Second, social acceptance involves the anticipation of social acceptance or rejection and mental state attribution, mediated by networks of reward, punishment, and mentalizing. Third, self-enhancement entails the excessive representation of positive self-related information and suppression of negative self-related information, ingroup favoritism and/or outgroup derogation, and elaborated mentalizing processes to the ingroup, supported by brain systems of reward, punishment, and mentalizing. Therefore, recent brain imaging studies have provided important insights into the fundamental motivations of social conformity in terms of component processes and brain mechanisms.

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Acknowledgements

This review was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32271126, 31900757, 32020103008, and 31920103009), Natural Science Foundation of Guangdong Province (2021A1515010746), the Major Project of National Social Science Foundation (20&ZD153), and Shenzhen-Hong Kong Institute of Brain Science–Shenzhen Fundamental Research Institutions (2019SHIBS0003).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Key Laboratory of Brain, Cognition and Education Sciences (South China Normal University), Ministry of Education, Guangzhou, 510631, China

    Xinling Chen, Jiaxi Liu & Chunliang Feng

  2. School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, China

    Xinling Chen, Jiaxi Liu & Chunliang Feng

  3. Center for Studies of Psychological Application, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, China

    Xinling Chen, Jiaxi Liu & Chunliang Feng

  4. Guangdong Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Cognitive Science, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, 510631, China

    Xinling Chen, Jiaxi Liu & Chunliang Feng

  5. Department of Applied Psychology, University of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences, Qingdao, 266113, China

    Yue-Jia Luo

  6. The State Key Lab of Cognitive and Learning, Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, 100875, China

    Yue-Jia Luo

  7. The Research Center of Brain Science and Visual Cognition, Kunming University of Science and Technology, Kunming, 650506, China

    Yue-Jia Luo

  8. College of Teacher Education, Qilu Normal University, Jinan, 250200, China

    Yue-Jia Luo

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Chen, X., Liu, J., Luo, YJ. et al. Brain Systems Underlying Fundamental Motivations of Human Social Conformity. Neurosci. Bull. 39, 328–342 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12264-022-00960-4

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