Is the change of mind made out of real conviction or is it more the influence of another person? A recent study highlights the fact that these two types of social influence do not manifest themselves in the same way in our brain.
Generally, when acting against our own beliefs, we tend to alter them to reduce our mental discomfort. Nevertheless, from the moment we receive new information that makes us doubt, we can be more influenced by people who deliver them to us than by the information itself. A study published in the journal PLOS Biology on March 2, 2020 confirms that these two types of social influence do not manifest themselves in the same way in our brain.
A team of neurologists from the University of Oxford (UK) and the University of Freiburg (Germany) tested several volunteers. The latter had to try to remember the location of a point on a screen. Volunteers could give confidence ratings to their own answers and could then change their minds based on the answers provided by the computer or by another person they met before the test. In reality, all the answers came from the computer.
During the experiment, functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) was used to measure brain activity participants.
The least we can say is that the results are rather surprising. The neurologists indicated that the volunteers were more likely to rely on the opinion of a third person when they didn't have so much self-confidence. This would be explained by the activity of the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (Brodmann's area 32) which is known for its role in error detection, but also in reasoning in general.
However, the results also show that volunteers tended to give more credit to their "partner" when the latter returned the favor. This normative influence otherwise only occurred when participants believed their partner was human. And only this normative influence would be linked to stronger functional connections towards this famous Brodmann area 32, as well as with other regions of the brain related to social interactions.
So the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex sets the weight of other people's opinions in social interaction. However, from a strictly informational point of view, it would treat information from a machine or a human the same. That said, when certain social norms such as reciprocity come into play, the weight of a computer's opinions matters very little.
