دانلود رایگان مقاله انگلیسی محاسبات عصبی با پشتیبانی مدیریت استراتژیک نفوذ پذیر در مشاوره - nature communications 2017

Research on social influence has focused mainly on the target of influence (e.g., consumer and voter); thus, the cognitive and neurobiological underpinnings of the source of the influence (e.g., politicians and salesmen) remain unknown. Here, in a three-sided advicegiving game, two advisers competed to influence a client by modulating their own confidence in their advice about which lottery the client should choose. We report that advisers’ strategy depends on their level of influence on the client and their merit relative to one another. Moreover, blood-oxygenation-level-dependent (BOLD) signal in the temporo-parietal junction is modulated by adviser’s current level of influence on the client, and relative merit prediction error affects activity in medial-prefrontal cortex. Both types of social information modulate ventral striatum response. By demonstrating what happens in our mind and brain when we try to influence others, these results begin to explain the biological mechanisms that shape inter-individual differences in social conduct.

Discussion

We set out to study how humans attempt to influence others and found a pattern of behavioural results consistent across multiple cohorts of participants playing the advice-giving game with either virtual or real confederates in web-based and laboratory-based experiments (respectively). Advice giving behaviour was driven by the interaction between two factors: the current level of influence over the client and the relative (i.e., social comparative) merit over the rival. Most prominently, when participants’ relative merit was positive (i.e., they were doing better than their rival), they followed what we called the ‘competitive’ strategy3 by expressing higher confidence when ignored by the client and lower confidence when selected by the client. Inter-individual variability in participants’ behaviour was captured by a personalized quantitative combination of the impact of these two factors on advice confidence placing each participant’s strategy along a spectrum ranging from competitive3 to defensive9. This quantitative profile was predictive of the participant’s selfreported FNE score8, thus grounding our paradigm firmly in previous research on self-esteem. Using fMRI, we found that the mPFC and VS tracked the changes in the participants’ inferred merit relative to the rival adviser (relative merit PE). The rTPJ tracked the client selection of adviser on each trial, with increased activity on trials in which the participant was ignored. Switches in client selection (from the participant to the rival adviser and vice versa) were tracked by VS activity. The temporal dynamics of the computations tracked by the BOLD signal in the VS were consistent with the unfolding of events across the trial, with relative merit PE tracked before selection by client.