AUTHOR=Vicente Unai , Ara Alberto , Palacín-Lois María , Marco-Pallarés Josep 

TITLE=Neurophysiological correlates of interpersonal discrepancy and social adjustment in an interactive decision-making task in dyads

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology

VOLUME=Volume 15 - 2024

YEAR=2024

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1272841

DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2024.1272841

ISSN=1664-1078

ABSTRACT=The pursuit of convergence and the social behavioral adjustment of conformity are fundamental cooperative behaviors that help people adjust their mental frameworks to reach a common goal. However, while social psychology extensively studies conformity by its influence context, there is still plenty to investigate about the neural cognitive mechanisms involved in this behavior. We proposed a paradigm with two phases, a pre-activation phase to enhance cooperative tendencies and, later, a social decision-making phase in which dyads had to make a perceptual estimation in three consecutive trials and could converge in their decisions without an explicit request or reward to do so.  Study 1 showed behavioral evidence from 80 participants that the pre-activation phase enhanced convergence in dyads. In Study 2, we registered in phase 2 the electroencephalographical (EEG) activity of 36 participants. Event-related Potentials (ERP) revealed signal differences in response divergence in three intervals. Time-frequency analysis showed theta, alpha, and beta evidence related to cognitive control, attention, and reward processing associated with social convergence.