Herding Brains: A Core Neural Mechanism for Social Alignment

Published on January 22, 2019

When we clap our hands in synchrony, feel the sadness of a friend, or match our attitudes to peer norms, we align our behavior with others. We propose here a model that views synchronized movement, emotional contagion, and social conformity as interrelated processes that rely on shared neural networks. Building on the predictive coding framework, we suggest that social alignment is mediated by a three-component feedback loop – an error-monitoring system that reacts to misalignment, an alignment system, and a reward system that is activated when alignment is achieved.

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