Popular individuals process the world in particularly normative ways

TL;DR

This study shows that highly popular individuals in communities process social and interpretive information in remarkably similar ways, as revealed by neuroimaging, which may underpin their social connectivity.

Contribution

It demonstrates a neural basis for social centrality, linking popularity to normative and convergent neural processing in high-level brain regions.

Findings

Highly central individuals have similar neural responses in social cognition regions.

Less-central individuals show more idiosyncratic neural responses.

Popularity correlates with normative processing of social information.

Abstract

People differ in how they attend to, interpret, and respond to their surroundings. Convergent processing of the world may be one factor that contributes to social connections between individuals. We used neuroimaging and network analysis to investigate whether the most central individuals in their communities (as measured by in-degree centrality, a notion of popularity) process the world in a particularly normative way. We found that more central individuals had exceptionally similar neural responses to their peers and especially to each other in brain regions that are associated with high-level interpretations and social cognition (e.g., in the default-mode network), whereas less-central individuals exhibited more idiosyncratic responses. Self-reported enjoyment of and interest in stimuli followed a similar pattern, but accounting for these data did not change our main results. These findings suggest that highly-central individuals process the world in exceptionally similar ways, whereas less-central individuals process the world in idiosyncratic ways.