Posts tagged popularity

Whether at the office, dorm, PTA meeting, or any other social setting, we all know intuitively who the popular people are – who is most liked – even if we can’t always put our finger on why. That information is often critical to professional or social success as you navigate your social networks. Yet until now, scientists have not understood how our brains recognize these popular people. In new work, researchers say that we track people’s popularity largely through the brain region involved in anticipating rewards.

“Being able to track other people’s status in your group is incredibly important in survival terms,” says Kevin Ochsner of Columbia University. “Knowing who is popular or likeable is critically important in times of need or distress, when you seek an alliance, or need help – whether physical or political – etc.” While sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists have long studied these group dynamics, neuroscientists have only begun to scratch the surface of how we think about people’s social status.

That is all changing, though, Ochsner says with many areas of work bringing together social psychology and sociology with cognitive neuroscience to better understand how individual brain processes connect to group membership. As will be presented today at the annual meeting of the Cognitive Neuroscience Society (CNS) in Boston, researchers are now studying at the neural level everything from social popularity to how ideas successfully spread in groups.

(Source: cogneurosociety.org)

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