14 DAY TRIAL // Experts at the Wellcome Trust Center for Neuroimaging, in the UK, say that they were finally able to determine why some people are more likely to comply with social influences and demands, where other are more likely to disagree, and subsequently rebel.
Apparently, the answer to this question could be derived from brain scans carried out on a group of 28 participants. Investigators led by Dr. Chris Frith, the study leader, were able to identify the areas of the brain that exhibit different activation patterns depending on how social pressures affect someone.
Frith, 70, is a professor emeritus at the University College London, and also holds an appointment as a Niels Bohr Visiting Professor at the Aarhus University, in Denmark. His goal for this research is figuring out how to tell rebels apart from conformists.
This study represents one of the first instances when anatomical measures were taken of individual tendencies to resist or conform to social pressures. In order to conduct the study, the team used neuroimaging technologies to look at test subjects' neural activation patterns.
One of the things the researchers were most interested in was learning whether the decisions we make are hardwired in the very structure of the brain – in the form of special neural pathways, for example – or if they are only the product of intricate neural firing patterns.
The study revealed that the amount of gray matter present in a person's lateral orbitofrontal cortex was directly related to that individual's likelihood of bowing down to social pressures, and becoming a conformist, PsychCentral reports.
Details of the new investigation were published in the latest issue of the esteemed journal Current Biology. During the experiments, the 28 participants were asked to name their favorite songs, and then had to listen to what professional music critics told them about these musical pieces.
All participants were asked to rate their favorite songs before the study. They were then shown the classifications made by the critics (the social pressure), and asked to create the same tops again. The differences in selection were attributed to the influence of social factors.
The OFC activated in people who bowed down to social pressures, the team reports. Scientists add that the volume of gray matter in this area of the brain could also be used as a predictor for how individuals would respond when critics' opinions disagreed with their own.
“The ability to adapt to others and align ourselves with them is an important social skill. However, at what level is this skill implemented in the brain? At a software (information processing) or hardware (structural) level?” Dr. Frith says.
“Our results show that social conformation is, at least in part, hard-wired in the structure of the brain,” he concludes.