Grounding the neuroscience of behavior change in the sociocultural context

•vmPFC activation in response to persuasive messages predicts behavior change.•Tailored health messages lead to greater subsequent behavior change.•vmPFC may mediate the effect of tailored messages on behavior change.•Culture may moderate the relationship between message content, vmPFC activation, and behavior change.

Recent work has identified ventral medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) as a key region predicting whether people will change their behavior in response to persuasive messages. Moreover, a parallel and complementary area of research has examined sociocultural factors that contribute to successful behavior change. In the current paper we aim to integrate these two distinct lines of research and discuss novel implications for the study of both behavior change and culture. We propose that personally and culturally tailored messages should lead to greater neural activation in vmPFC and this greater neural activation should lead to greater subsequent behavior change; we also consider broader neural systems that may integrate social norms and perspectives into judgments across culture.