14 DAY TRIAL // According to a new scientific study, published in the January 15th issue of the journal Neuron, humans tend to follow the crowd because of an innate mechanism inside their brains, which triggers an alert signal when an individual's opinion diverges from the general one. This signal could be the one that dictates the body to adjust its behavior, so as to feel included. The body thus gets rid of the danger alert and can resume normal operations.
"We often change our decisions and judgments to conform with normative group behavior. However, the neural mechanisms of social conformity remain unclear," says the lead author of the new research, Dr. Vasily Klucharev, who is a behavioral expert at the F.C. Donders Center for Cognitive Neuroimaging, in the Netherlands.
"The present study explains why we often automatically adjust our opinion in line with the majority opinion. 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," the researcher adds, saying that group opinions have the ability to change an individual's long-term beliefs, if the danger that the person passes through is real and very high.
Basically, in a crowded situation, "behavioral adjustment" is the key concept. The nature of this change is what triggers the behavior of the overall mob. If most people are violent, then those who would otherwise avoid confrontation may be found in the first lines as well. Furthermore, it's often that the most harmless people get to be the most violent in protests, aiming to prove to the others that they are not outcasts, and that they shouldn't be banished.
In order to arrive to these conclusions, Klucharev used magnetic resonance imaging to scan the brain of participants for reactions when they learned that their judgment over the attractiveness level of a face was not compliant with that of the group. The researchers noted an obvious tendency of coming to an accord.