On January 30, 2019, Jian Li’s team from School of Psychological and Cognitive Science of Peking University published the paper "Private but not social information validity modulates social conformity bias" in the journal of Human Brain Mapping. The study found that in the social context, the validity of private information can modulate social conformity bias, accurate private information improves the impact of private information on the decision making, so as to reduce the social conformity behavior. At the same time, the transition of behavior preference is supported by the neural evidence. The study found that the striatum activated greater when private information was accurate than when it was inaccurate. If the private information can accurately predict the result, then the functional coupling of striatum and dorsal medial prefrontal (dmPFC) was stronger. Moreover, the activations of dmPFC associated with detecting the deviation from private information were also stronger.
In daily life, individual choices are easily influenced by the opinions of others. Under the uncertain situation, when private information and social information are inconsistent, individuals tend to choose to follow the social information and ignore private information, that is, social conformity. Although optimal decisions can be made by integrating all sources of information, it will mislead people and cause property loss or chaos if the social information is inaccurate. However, little is known about how to reduce the impact of false social information. Jian Li’s team adopted the probabilistic judgment task in the social context to study this problem. During the experiment, the researchers manipulated the validities of private information and social information, which only private information can predict the results. The feedback would be presented for the participants after they made a choice within a trial. The study aimed to examine whether the participants can gradually learn the validities of different information sources from the feedback, and then adjust their strategies to integrate the private information and social information.
The results showed that when private information was inconsistent with social information, the participants tended to choose the option consistent with social information. But the proportion of social conformity gradually declined over time. Through applying the general linear model, the researchers found that the impact of private information gradually increased. Further analysis showed that the accuracy of private information in the previous trial affected the impact of private information in the next trial. Although the validity of social information had also been manipulated, the impact of social information did not change. Correspondingly, the study found that, during the phase of feedback, the striatum responded differently to the accurate private information and the inaccurate private information. But there were no significant different activations whether social information was correct or not. In addition, when the private information was accurate, the functional connection between the striatum and dmPFC was stronger than when private information was inaccurate. Further analysis showed that during the decision phase, dmPFC's monitoring of private information deviation was also regulated by the validity of the private information in the previous trials. When the private information of the previous trial was accurate, the dmPFC’s detection of deviating from the private information was stronger in the next trial. This study reveals the neural mechanism of how private information validity regulates social conformity, and provides new ideas for avoiding the negative effects caused by incorrect social information.
Li Li, the phD student from School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, was the first author of the paper. Jian Li, the professor from the School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, was the corresponding author. Associate professor King King Li from Shenzhen Audencia Business School, Shenzhen University, contributed to this paper. The work was funded by National Natural Science Foundation of China and Ministry of Science and Technology of the People's Republic of China.
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