CC-0. https://pixabay.com/illustrations/brain-mind-think-thought-intellect-7293475/
CC-0. https://pixabay.com/illustrations/brain-mind-think-thought-intellect-7293475/

Scientists can tell what you'll buy by scanning your friends' brains

Embargoed until: Publicly released:
Peer-reviewed: This work was reviewed and scrutinised by relevant independent experts.

Close friendships can lead to friends' brain activity and even their shopping habits becoming similar, according to Chinese scientists. They ran a series of experiments in which 175 participants of varying degrees of friendship were asked to evaluate products and say whether they'd buy them or not. They found friends were more likely to purchase the same products, compared with strangers. In tandem, they scanned the brains of 37 people, also of varying degrees of friendship, as they watched TV ads for products. They found that as friends viewed ads together, their brain activity synchronised, with increased activity seen in brain regions linked with object perception, attention, memory, social judgement, and reward processing. The researchers were then able to predict which goods a person would buy based on their brain activity alone, and the goods their friends were likely to purchase too.

Journal/conference: JNeurosci

Research: Paper

Organisation/s: Shanghai International Studies University, China, Joint Lab of Finance and Business Intelligence, China

Funder: This study was funded by the National Natural Science Foundation of China [7227 1166, 72172092], Shanghai Key Laboratory of Brain-Machine Intelligence for Information Behavior [22dz2261100] and the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities [41005067].

Media release

From: Society for Neuroscience

Friendship promotes neural and behavioral similarity

Close relationships match neural activity between friends to promote similar cognitive behavior. This activity can even predict the purchasing intentions of both friends.

How does friendship affect the human brain and influence behavior? In a new study, Jia Jin and colleagues, from Shanghai International Studies University, present their work examining how close relationships influence consumer behavior and neural activity. Through a combination of long-term behavioral experiments with 175 participants and neuroimaging data from 47 participants, the researchers shed light on how friendships promote neural and behavioral similarity.

Participants evaluated products more similarly to their friends than strangers. As friends grew closer over time, this similarity became even stronger. Neuroimaging revealed that as friends viewed advertisements together, they had synchronized neural activity linked to object perception, attention, memory, social judgement, and reward processing. Lastly, Jin et al. discovered brain activity of study participants that could predict not only their own purchasing intentions, but also the intentions of their friends.

According to the authors, this work advances understanding of how strongly dynamic social relationships can influence behavior. The authors’ findings suggest that close relationships can predictably shape the way people act, at least when it comes to consumer-related behaviors.

Attachments:

Note: Not all attachments are visible to the general public

  •  Research
    Society for Neuroscience
    Web page
    The URL will go live after the embargo ends

News for:

International

Media contact details for this story are only visible to registered journalists.