The Neurocognitive Underpinnings of Social Influence

Beginning of the Chapter: "Since the seminal studies by Sherif (1935) and Asch (1956), social psychologists have aimed to understand how social influence shapes individuals’ minds, that is, to open “the black box” of our mind and identify the cognitive processes mediating the effects of social influence.During the last two decades, more and more studies have used neuroscientific methods to address this fundamental issue. By observing brain activity as social influence unfolds, this research has opened up a new perspective on social influence. Specifically, this approach mapped out an ever finer graded picture of the cognitive processes driving social influence, which had not been seen before. Additionally, because this approach automatically investigates the differences and similarity between the neurocognitive mechanism driving social influence and other (social) psychological phenomena (e.g., learning, memory, …) it provides a new integrative understanding of social influence. In the current chapter, I aim to summarize the most important insights from this new perspective. Since the vast majority of neuroscientific research on social influence used experimental paradigms similar to the classical studies of Sherif (1935) and Asch (1956), and, hence, investigate social influence in a group context (cf. Schnuerch & Gibbons, 2014; Wu et al., 2016), I will focus on this research. ..."