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

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, there is still plenty to investigate about the neural mechanisms underlying this behavior. We proposed a paradigm with two phases, a pre-activation phase to enhance cooperative tendencies and, later, a social decision-making phase where conformity happens spontaneously and synchronously through the pursuit of convergence. Study 1 shows evidence from 80 participants that the pre-activation phase enhances convergence in dyads. In Study 2, we registered in phase 2 the electroencephalographical (EEG) activity of 36 participants in which dyads had to make a perceptual estimation in three consecutive trials and converge in their decisions without an explicit request or reward to do so. 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.