Brain dynamics of recommendation-based social influence on preference change : A magnetoencephalography study

Abstract

People change their preferences when exposed to others’ opinions. We examine the neural basis of how peer feedback influences an individual’s recommendation behavior. In addition, we investigate if the personality trait of ‘agreeableness’ modulates behavioral change and neural responses. In our experiment, participants with low and high agreeableness indicated their degree of recommendation of commercial brands, while subjected to peer group feedback. The associated neural responses were recorded with concurrent magnetoencephalography. After a delay, the participants were asked to reevaluate the brands. Recommendations changed consistently with conflicting feedback only when peer recommendation was lower than the initial recommendation. On the neural level, feedback evoked neural responses in the medial frontal and lateral parietal cortices, which were stronger for conflicting peer opinions. Conflict also increased neural oscillations in 4–10 Hz and decreased oscillations in 13–30 Hz in medial frontal and parietal cortices§. The change in recommendation behavior was not different between the low and high agreeableness groups. However, the groups differed in neural oscillations in the alpha and beta bands, when recommendation matched with feedback. In addition to corroborating earlier findings on the role of conflict monitoring in feedback processing, our results suggest that agreeableness modulates neural processing of peer feedback.