Social influence and the brain: persuasion, susceptibility to influence and retransmission

• Neural data complement other methods in advancing social influence research.
• Multi-method approaches are well-suited to explain complex influence processes.
• Neural data can predict real-world behavioral outcomes beyond the imaging lab.
• Current brain mapping knowledge should be combined with network approaches.

Social influence is an important topic of research, with a particularly long history in the social sciences. Recently, social influence has also become a topic of interest among neuroscientists. The aim of this review is to highlight current research that has examined neural systems associated with social influence, from the perspective of being influenced as well as influencing others, and highlight studies that link neural mechanisms with real-world behavior change beyond the laboratory. Although many of the studies reviewed focus on localizing brain regions implicated in influence within the lab, we argue that approaches that account for networks of brain regions and that integrate neural data with data beyond the laboratory are likely to be most fruitful in understanding influence.