You’ve probably heard that you and your friends are on the same wavelength — that you’re attuned to each other and share similar opinions, ideas, and behaviors. While the phrase is mostly meant in a figurative sense, it turns out that it’s also true literally: Studies shows that your brain waves actually sync with those of your friends.
In a new study in JNeurosci, the journal of the Society for Neuroscience, researchers have investigated how friendships influence behavior and brain activity in consumer contexts. Applying both behavioral approaches and fMRI brain imaging, the team found that friendships prompt behavioral and neural similarity, with the brain activity of one friend providing a preview of the brain activity, as well as the behavior, of the other.
“The current study reveals the predictive capacity of neural activity in predicting the behavior of friends,” the team wrote in the study. “This research offers valuable insights into the intersection of neuroscience, social behavior, and consumer decision-making.”
Read More: Why Do We Make Bad Shopping Decisions?
Friendship Influence on the Brain
Of course, our friends influence us in a variety of ways. (Think of that book that you bought at a buddy’s recommendation, or maybe that new snack that your friend said you just had to try.) But how our friends impact our behavior and our brain activity, particularly in consumer contexts, is still far from clear.
To learn more, researchers from the Shanghai International Studies University recruited 175 participants, all of whom were undergraduate students from the same university.
On two separate occasions, around a year apart, the researchers asked the participants about their friendships, allowing the team to determine which students were friends and which students became closer friends over the course of the year. Then, the researchers presented the participants with photos of products and asked them to assess whether they would be interested in purchasing those products themselves.
The participants’ responses revealed that they shared the same opinions of the products much more frequently with friends than with non-friends. They also showed that this tendency increased as their friendships strengthened, indicating that friendships promote behavioral similarities over time, and at least in the context of commerce.
“Friends, compared to non-friends, exhibit higher similarity in product evaluation,” the researchers wrote in the study, “which undergoes dynamic changes as the structure of social networks changes.”
Read More: Is a Shopping Addiction Real?
Predicting Brain Activity and Behavior
So, friendships support similar behavior between friends, but what about brain activity? Hooking up an additional 47 participants to fMRI machines, the researchers determined that neural synchrony, or the alignment of neural activity, also occurs between friends when it comes to a shopping context.
Indeed, the participants’ brains displayed the same patterns of social judgement, object perception, attention, memory, and reward processing activity as their friends’ brains displayed when they watched the same advertisements. This suggests that these patterns of synchronized neural activity could be used to determine what we will buy and what our friends will buy, based only on one brain.
“Friends exhibit heightened neural synchrony, which is linked to cognitive functions,” the researchers wrote in their study. “Neural activity not only reflects shared cognitive functions, but also predicts purchase intentions of individuals and their close friends with greater accuracy than strangers.”
Taken together, the results reveal just how much our friendships affect us — syncing our brains and shaping our behaviors, not only for the big things, but for the small things, too — during a trip to the mall, a stop at the grocery store, or a visit to your favorite online store.
Article Sources
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Sam Walters is a journalist covering archaeology, paleontology, ecology, and evolution for Discover, along with an assortment of other topics. Before joining the Discover team as an assistant editor in 2022, Sam studied journalism at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois.
