Using fMRI to examine the activity of participant's brains, the researchers asked participants to judge the attractiveness of faces. As expected, participants tended to modify their judgements in line with group norms. The fMRI scans revealed that the brain areas activated when participants were adjusting their opinions were an area associated with learning from mistakes, the rostral cingulate zone, and an area associated with anticipating and processing rewards and social learning.
"The present study explains why we often automatically adjust our opinion in line with the majority opinion," says Dr. Klucharev. "Our results also show that social conformity is based on mechanisms that comply with reinforcement learning and is reinforced by the neural error-monitoring activity which signals what is probably the most fundamental social mistake—that of being too different from others."
In other words being different from others is unlikely to lead to reinforcement, but if we change our opinions to match those of others we are likely to gain their social approval.
