Neural Representations of Popularity and Leadership Status Relate to Conformity in Daily Life

Individuals are motivated to increase their social status (1). To succeed in this pursuit, people must make inferences about the structure of their social networks, monitor group norms, and adjust their behavior strategically. This study employed functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and ecological momentary assessment (EMA) methods in a sample of 92 college students belonging to 9 social groups to elucidate the neural mechanisms underlying these processes and their relationship to conformity in the context of alcohol use. When young adults passively looked at faces of their real-life social network peers, brain systems implicated in valuation and social cognition spontaneously represented information about the popularity and leadership status of the social target. Individual differences in these neural valuations were systematically associated with varying levels of conformity to group drinking norms in everyday life. Students who had stronger responses to faces of peers with relatively higher popularity and leadership status than themselves in one key valuation brain region, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC), were more likely to align their behavior with their groups’ drinking norms in daily life. These results provide novel evidence for how brain systems involved in valuation and social cognition track multidimensional (popularity and leadership) information about real-life social networks and contribute to a growing literature on the neural mechanisms through which social comparison processes shape conformity (2). Our study highlights the vmPFC as a central hub that spontaneously tracks differences between the self and peers and uses this information to guide behavior to match group norms.