Via Health Canal (H/T Association for Psychological Science). You can read more about this study here.
What is conformity? A true adoption of what other people think—or a guise to avoid social rejection? Scientists have been vexed sorting the two out, even when they’ve questioned people in private.
Now three Harvard University psychological scientists have used brain scans to show what happens when we take others’ opinions to heart: We take them “to brain”—specifically, to the orbitofrontal cortex and nucleus accumbens. These regions compute what we value and feel rewarded by, both primitive things like water and food and socially meaningful things like money.
The study—by Jamil Zaki, Jessica Schirmer, and Jason Mitchell—is published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association of Psychological Science.
“Conformity gets a bad rap,” says Zaki, a postdoctoral fellow. “That is partially predicated on the idea that it is a form of lying: you’re lying about yourself to try to fit in. Our data suggest that at a deep emotional level you really are changing your view.”
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