Wei Zhenyu, Zhao Zhiying, Zheng Yong
Key Laboratory for NeuroInformation of Ministry of Education, School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, China.
Key Laboratory of Cognition and Personality (MOE), Faculty of Psychology, Southwest University, Chongqing, China.
Front Neurosci. 2019 Feb 11;13:89. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2019.00089. eCollection 2019.
When making decisions, people may change their behavior, sometimes against their personal preference, according to the opinions of peers. However, the effect of social influence on trust is still unknown. In our study, we used the event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging to investigate brain activity in social influence during a trust game. The behavioral results revealed that people tend to conform to others' opinions and behaviors in a trust game. Decreased activations were observed in superior temporal gyrus during processing of social influences. Moreover, brain regions supporting value processing and reward learning were activated when subjects decided to follow the majority. These regions include the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, ventral striatum, and parahippocampal gyrus. Finally, our exploratory analysis revealed an increase in functional connectivity between the prefrontal cortex and the ventral striatum during conformity in trusting behavior. These findings indicate that the neural basis of social influence in trusting behavior are similar to the mechanisms implicated in reward learning. The brain regions involved in reward learning might reflect the reward value of agreeing with others in our study.
在做决策时，人们可能会根据同伴的意见改变自己的行为，有时甚至违背个人偏好。然而，社会影响对信任的作用仍然未知。在我们的研究中，我们使用事件相关功能磁共振成像来研究信任游戏中社会影响下的大脑活动。行为结果显示，在信任游戏中人们倾向于顺应他人的意见和行为。在处理社会影响过程中，颞上回的激活减少。此外，当受试者决定跟随多数人时，支持价值处理和奖励学习的脑区被激活。这些区域包括腹内侧前额叶皮层、腹侧纹状体和海马旁回。最后，我们的探索性分析表明，在信任行为的从众过程中，前额叶皮层和腹侧纹状体之间的功能连接增加。这些发现表明，信任行为中社会影响的神经基础与奖励学习所涉及的机制相似。在我们的研究中，参与奖励学习的脑区可能反映了与他人意见一致的奖励价值。
