Neural Synchrony and Consumer Behavior: Predicting Friends' Behavior in Real-World Social Networks

The endogenous aspect of social influence, reflected in the spontaneous alignment of behaviors within close social relationships, plays a crucial role in understanding human social behavior. In two studies involving 222 human subjects (Study 1: n = 175, 106 females; Study 2: n = 47, 33 females), we used a longitudinal behavioral study and a naturalistic stimuli neuroimaging study to investigate the endogenous consumer behavior similarities and their neural basis in real-world social networks. The findings reveal that friends, compared with nonfriends, exhibit higher similarity in product evaluation, which undergoes dynamic changes as the structure of social networks changes. Both neuroimaging and meta-analytic decoding results indicate that friends exhibit heightened neural synchrony, which is linked to cognitive functions such as object perception, attention, memory, social judgment, and reward processing. Stacking machine learning-based predictive models demonstrate that the functional connectivity maps of brain activity can predict the purchase intention of their friends or their own rather than strangers. Based on the significant neural similarity which exists among individuals in close relationships within authentic social networks, the current study reveals the predictive capacity of neural activity in predicting the behavior of friends.