Research On The Neural Mechanism Of Conformity And Obedience

Imitation is human nature. People always choose the choice of the public as their reference. Conformity is very common in real life even people do not realize they are herding sometimes. Comformity includes a lot of behavior forms:"with the flow" is a kind of conformity in everyday life; complicance to other people; and obedience to the authority. Conformity is considered as a social behavior under the influence of social reaction so it is regarded as a social phenomenon and is always an important research filed of social psychology. Along with the management of the development of marketing, many scholars begin to study the comformity in consumer areas, particularly the phenomenon of online herding and have gained a lot of achievements in both theory and practice.Traditional research methods are questionnaire and conduct experiment while studying herd. With the development of cognitive neuroscience, many studies have gone to the psychological level, and further to the neural level. Neuroscience research techniques, such as functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), event-related potentials (ERP) and other methods, have helped further the depths of the neuronal activity to explore and understand herd behavior in deep.The research simulated consumers purchase books online, aiming to lead two different kinds of behavior: conformity to majority and obedience to authority. Then the research explored the neural mechanism the behavior of conformity and obedience with the event-related potential technology. In addition, the similarities and differences of comformity and obedience under the different consistencies have be discussed. According to the behavioral data and EEG data, this study has arrive at the following two conclusions:(1) Compared with the conformity, obedience decision evoked a larger conflict, manifested in event-related potential amplitude of the N2 component.(2) Both conformity and obedience contain a classification decision-making process, manifested in event-related potential of the P3 component; the higher level of review consistency, the greater amplitude of the P3 component.