Summary: A new study shows our brains naturally give greater weight to the opinions of people who appear confident.
Source: University of Sussex
Confidence carries biological weight: the brain treats confident people’s opinions as more valuable.
Researchers who measured brain activity report that human decision-making favors the opinions of confident individuals. The study, published in the Journal of Neuroscience and led by Dr. Daniel Campbell‑Meiklejohn of the University of Sussex, identifies a specific brain region that responds to others’ confidence when we form expectations and make choices.
In experiments with 23 healthy volunteers, the team separated three influences on expectations of success: direct personal experience, what the majority seems to believe, and the opinions of people who express confidence. While the first two influences broadly engaged the brain’s reward circuitry, opinions offered with confidence produced a distinctive additional effect in a brain area associated with later stages of human evolution.
That additional neural response was localized next to a region that supports thinking about other people’s mental states. The proximity suggests this area may help the brain infer the reliability of a confident person’s information, then decide whether to incorporate that information into one’s own judgement.
Dr. Campbell‑Meiklejohn commented, “This additional effect seems likely to be the mechanism by which the confidence of others can give us reassurance in our actions. Our findings suggest that social transmission of beliefs and preferences is not as straightforward as copying the person next to you. Other elements are clearly at play during the decision‑making process.”
He added, “We can now consider that this part of the brain may be inferring, correctly or incorrectly, the quality of the confident person’s information before deciding whether or not to let that person change our beliefs. In today’s political climate in particular, we should be aware that when facts aren’t clear, we may be biologically tuned to allow seemingly confident people to hold more sway on our own beliefs.”
The study involved collaboration with researchers at Aarhus University, University College London and Princeton University.
Source: University of Sussex
Image source: NeuroscienceNews.com image adapted from the University of Sussex press release.
Original research: Abstract for “Independent Neural Computation of Value from Other People’s Confidence” by Daniel Campbell‑Meiklejohn, Arndis Simonsen, Chris D. Frith and Nathaniel D. Daw, Journal of Neuroscience. Published online December 9, 2016. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4490-15.2016
Abstract
Independent Neural Computation of Value from Other People’s Confidence
Expectation of reward can be shaped by observing the actions and expressions of people around us. A person’s apparent confidence in the likely outcome of an action makes qualities of their evidence socially accessible even when that evidence is not directly observed. This process differs from associative learning based on direct observation because it relies on inference from indirect cues.
In twenty‑three healthy human subjects, the researchers isolated the influences of first‑hand experience, other people’s choices, and the mediating effect of those people’s confidence on decision‑making and neural representations of value within the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC). Values derived from first‑hand experience and from other people’s choices (regardless of confidence) were represented broadly across vmPFC. By contrast, value computed from others’ choices when those choices were weighted by expressed confidence was represented specifically in ventromedial area 10.
This anatomical pattern corresponds to shifts in connectivity and overlapping cognitive processes along a posterior‑to‑anterior vmPFC axis. Behavioral measures and self‑reported tendencies toward self‑reliance in decision‑making correlated with task performance. Greater susceptibility to social conformity corresponded to increased activation in cortical regions that respond to social conflict in proportion to subsequent conformity. The tendency to self‑monitor predicted an enhanced response to agreement with others in the right temporoparietal junction (rTPJ). These results decompose value representations in vmPFC according to computational demands and shed light on how confidence in others can transmit preferences and provide reassurance.
SIGNIFICANCE STATEMENT
Decades of work show the vmPFC signals expected satisfaction from impending actions, yet how value representations are organized across this region is not well understood. This study shows that cues to the reliability of other people’s knowledge can enhance expected personal success and generate value correlates anatomically distinct from those derived from direct experience. The findings suggest vmPFC organizes decision values according to the underlying computation and illuminate how others’ confidence can sway our choices through observational learning.
“Independent Neural Computation of Value from Other People’s Confidence” by Daniel Campbell‑Meiklejohn, Arndis Simonsen, Chris D. Frith and Nathaniel D. Daw. Journal of Neuroscience. Published online December 9, 2016. doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.4490-15.2016