Social Influence and Persuasion and Message Propagation

Our decisions are affected not only by objective information about the available options but also by other people. Recent brain imaging studies have adopted the cognitive neuroscience approach for studying the neural mechanisms of social influence. A number of studies have shown that social influence is associated with neural activity in the medial prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum, which are two brain areas involved in the fundamental and not exclusively social mechanisms of performance monitoring. Therefore, the neural mechanisms of social influence could be deeply integrated into our general neuronal performance-monitoring mechanisms.