Our personal values are subject to forces of social influence. Deontological resolve captures how strongly one relies on absolute rules of right and wrong in the representation of one's personal values and may predict willingness to modify one's values in the presence of social influence. Using fMRI, we found that a neurobiological metric for deontological resolve based on relative activity in the ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) during the passive processing of sacred values predicted individual differences in conformity. Individuals with stronger deontological resolve, as measured by greater VLPFC activity, displayed lower levels of conformity. We also tested whether responsiveness to social reward, as measured by ventral striatal activity during social feedback, predicted variability in conformist behavior across individuals but found no significant relationship. From these results we conclude that unwillingness to conform to others' values is associated with a strong neurobiological representation of social rules.
Pubmed ID: 25170989 RIS Download
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Set of (mostly) C programs that run on X11+Unix-based platforms (Linux, Mac OS X, Solaris, etc.) for processing, analyzing, and displaying functional MRI (FMRI) data defined over 3D volumes and over 2D cortical surface meshes. AFNI is freely distributed as source code plus some precompiled binaries.
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