Neural Mechanisms Involved in Social Conformity and Psychopathic Traits: Prediction Errors, Reward Processing and Saliency

Frontiers in Behavioral Neuroscience
Sandy OvergaauwEllen R A de Bruijn

Abstract

Aligning behavior in favor of group norms, i.e., social conformity, can help to successfully adapt to uncertain environments and may result in social approval. This may lead to enhanced feelings of belongingness and is found to be associated with reward-related activations in the brain. Individuals high on psychopathic traits violate group norms regularly. Yet, it is unclear how psychopathic traits are related to neural mechanisms involved in social conformity. This functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study includes 42 healthy females scoring low or high on the Psychopathic Personality Inventory questionnaire (PPI). Participants were asked to rate the trustworthiness of 120 faces while lying in the scanner. After rating each face, participants were presented with the group rating of European students. In an unanticipated second part participants rated all faces again, allowing us to focus on two main contrasts: (1) "Social conflict": group opinion in conflict with the participant's rating vs. group opinion aligned with participant rating; and (2) "Conformity": conflict trials followed by conformity vs. conflict trials followed by non-conformity. Behaviorally, the two groups showed similar conformity behavior. fMRI resu...Continue Reading

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