Understanding the neurobiology and computational mechanisms of social conformity: implications for psychiatric disorders.

Abstract

Social conformity and psychiatric disorders share overlapping brain regions and neural pathways, arousing our interest in uncovering their potentially shared underlying neural and computational mechanisms. Critically, the dynamics of group behavior may either mitigate or exacerbate mental health conditions, highlighting the need to bridge social neuroscience and psychiatry. Our work examines how aberrant neurobiological circuits and computations influence social conformity. We propose a hierarchical computational framework, based on dynamical systems and active inference, to facilitate the interpretation of the multi-layered interplay among processes that drive social conformity. We underscore the significant implications of this hierarchical computational framework for guiding future research on psychiatry, particularly with respect to the clinical translation of interventions such as targeted pharmacotherapy and neurostimulation techniques. The interdisciplinary efforts hold the potential to propel the fields of social and clinical neuroscience forward, fostering the emergence of more efficacious and individualized therapeutic approaches tailored to psychiatric disorders characterized by aberrant social behaviors.