Department of Psychology, University of California, Los Angeles, PA 19104, USA.
Psychol Sci. 2013 Jul 1;24(7):1234-42. doi: 10.1177/0956797612474670. Epub 2013 May 30.
Social interaction promotes the spread of values, attitudes, and behaviors. Here, we report on neural responses to ideas that are destined to spread. We scanned message communicators using functional MRI during their initial exposure to the to-be-communicated ideas. These message communicators then had the opportunity to spread the messages and their corresponding subjective evaluations to message recipients outside the scanner. Successful ideas were associated with neural responses in the communicators' mentalizing systems and reward systems when they first heard the messages, prior to spreading them. Similarly, individuals more able to spread their own views to others produced greater mentalizing-system activity during initial encoding. Unlike prior social-influence studies that focused on the individuals being influenced, this investigation focused on the brains of influencers. Successful social influence is reliably associated with an influencer-to-be's state of mind when first encoding ideas.
社会互动促进了价值观、态度和行为的传播。在这里，我们报告了对注定要传播的想法的神经反应。我们使用功能磁共振成像对消息传播者进行了扫描，这些传播者在初次接触到要传播的想法时就进行了扫描。然后，这些消息传播者有机会将消息及其相应的主观评价传播给扫描室外的消息接收者。当传播者第一次听到消息时，成功的想法与他们的心理化系统和奖励系统的神经反应有关，而这些消息在传播之前就已经存在。同样，在最初的编码过程中，能够将自己的观点更好地传播给他人的个体，产生了更大的心理化系统活动。与之前专注于被影响个体的社会影响研究不同，这项研究专注于影响者的大脑。成功的社会影响与影响者在最初编码想法时的心态可靠相关。
