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Dr Uri Hertz, UCL "How to influence others and get approval from your granny: The neural computations underlying strategic management of social influence"

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Venue: Birkbeck Main Building, Malet Street

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Dr Uri Hertz, UCL

"How to influence others and get approval from your granny: The neural computations underlying strategic management of social influence"

Abstract:

Research on social influence has mainly focused on the target of influence (e.g. consumer, voter), while the cognitive and neurobiological underpinnings of the source of the influence (e.g. spin doctor, investment consultant) remain unexplored. Here I explore the internal motivations and the external settings underlying advice giving strategies. In a novel trial-by-trial advice giving paradigm, advisers managed their influence over their client strategically, by modulating the confidence of their advice, depending on the interaction between adviser's level of influence on the client (i.e. ignored or chosen by the client), and relative merit (i.e. comparison with a rival). These factors were captured using a computational model, and used to examine the neural computation underlying influence management. Functional magnetic resonance imaging showed that these factors were tracked in distinct regions of the brain's social and valuation systems: relative merit in the medial-prefrontal cortex, and client selection in the temporo-parietal junction. Both sources of information modulated activity in the ventral striatum. These results open a new perspective on our understanding of how social influence shapes relationships, and the way in which subdivisions of the social brain track these multiple relationships.

Graphic abstract (comics):

http://frithmind.org/socialminds/2014/09/22/how-to-influence-people-and-get-approval-from-your-granny-by-uri-hertz/