Neural Basis of Two Kinds of Social Influence: Obedience and Conformity

Event-related potentials (ERPs) were used in this study to explore the neural mechanism of obedience and conformity on the model of online book purchasing. Participants were asked to decide as quickly as possible whether to buy a book based on limited information including its title, keywords and number of positive and negative reviews. Obedience was induced by forcing participants to buy books which received mostly negative reviews. In contrast, conformity was aroused by majority influence (caused by positive and negative comments). P3 and N2, two kinds of ERP components related to social cognitive process, were measured and recorded with electroencephalogram (EEG) test. The results show that compared with conformity decisions, obedience decisions induced greater cognitive conflicts. In ERP measurements, greater amplitudes of N2 component were observed in the context of obedience. However, consistency level did not make a difference on P3 peak latency for both conformity and obedience. This shows that classification process is implicit in both conformity and obedience decision-making. In addition, for both conformity and obedience decisions, augmented P3 was observed when the reviews consistency (either negative or positive) was higher.