14 DAY TRIAL // Researchers from the Columbia University are now using a host of modern technologies to answer a series of old questions related to how people recognize things such as popular music and people, how they react when exposed to higher or lower social statuses, and how they respond to the informational messages they are exposed to everyday.
Details of their study were recently presented at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS), which took place April 5-9 in Boston, Massachusetts. Figuring out the pathways that enable these abilities, if confirmed, would constitute an important step forward in our understanding of the human brain, team leader Kevin Ochsner, PhD, said.
Like many other species, humans have the ability to innately and intuitively determine which person in a social group is the most popular, or most liked. Oftentimes, it is impossible for us to explain exactly how we came to that realization, but our original assumptions usually hold true nonetheless. This is true at the office, at the restaurant, at a dinner with your extended family, or any other social setting.
As such, successfully navigating social networks is often a function of how well you can perceive this type of information. Both professional and social success often hinge on your ability to accurately assess who the person around whom the group revolves is. The new study found that the brain region most actively involved in anticipating rewards is the one we use to track down these individuals.
Group dynamics have been the subject of sociological, psychological, and anthropological studies for years, but neuroscience provides a relatively new angle to look at this issue. “Being able to track other people’s status in your group is incredibly important in survival terms,” Ochsner explains.
“Knowing who is popular or likeable is critically important in times of need or distress, when you seek an alliance, or need help – whether physical or political – etc,” the researcher adds. He explains that the previous approach to studying social success is dispersing, and that a new paradigm is taking over.
“That is all changing, though, with many areas of work bringing together social psychology and sociology with cognitive neuroscience to better understand how individual brain processes connect to group membership,” Ochsner says. This is one of the first studies to analyze how popularity brings social status; all previous researches focused on the other important component in a group, power.
“Now that we have a simple way of defining for a given group who is popular, we can then ask how it is that the brain is representing what it means for someone to have this kind of liking-based status, or popularity, within the context of a group,” Ochsner concludes, quoted by PsychCentral.