Title: Neural Synchrony and Consumer Behavior: Predicting Friends’ Behavior in Real-World Social Networks

Speaker: Jin Jia, Professor, Vice Dean, School of International Business Administration, Shanghai International Studies University; Ph.D. Supervisor; Deputy Director of the Key Laboratory of Brain-Computer Collaborative Information Behavior (Ministry of Education and Shanghai Municipality). She has presided over more than 10 national and provincial-level projects including General Programs of the National Natural Science Foundation of China, Key Sub-projects, and Projects of the Humanities and Social Sciences Foundation of the Ministry of Education. She has participated in the Major Project of Science and Technology Innovation 2030. She has published more than 70 achievements in domestic and foreign TOP journals such as "Journal of Business Ethics" (FT50), "The Journal of Neuroscience" and "Acta Psychologica Sinica", obtained 10 authorized invention patents, and won awards such as the Second Prize of Science and Technology Progress of Zhejiang Province, the Third Prize of Wu Wenjun Artificial Intelligence Science and Technology Progress Award, the Silver Award of the United Nations Global Innovation Conference Award, the Second Prize of National Teaching Achievements, and the Special Prize of Shanghai Teaching Achievements. She serves as a reviewer for more than 40 SCI/SSCI journals, Deputy Director of the Neuroeconomic Management Professional Committee of the Chinese Society of Technology Economics, Director of the Chinese Society of Technology Economics, Director of the Chinese Society of Information Economics, Director of the Neuromanagement and Neuroengineering Research Association of the Chinese Society of Management Science and Engineering, and Editorial Board Member of "Psychological Science".

Abstract: The endogenous aspect of social influence, reflected in the spontaneous alignment of behaviors within close social relationships, plays a crucial role in understanding human social behavior. In two studies, we used a longitudinal behavioral study and a naturalistic stimuli neuroimaging study to investigate the endogenous consumer behavior similarities and their neural basis in real-world social networks. The findings reveal that friends, compared with nonfriends, exhibit higher similarity in product evaluation, which undergoes dynamic changes as the structure of social networks changes. Both neuroimaging and meta-analytic decoding results indicate that friends exhibit heightened neural synchrony, which is linked to cognitive functions such as object perception, attention, memory, social judgment, and reward processing. Stacking machine learning-based predictive models demonstrate that the functional connectivity maps of brain activity can predict the purchase intention of their friends or their own rather than strangers. Based on the significant neural similarity which exists among individuals in close relationships within authentic social networks, the current study reveals the predictive capacity of neural activity in predicting the behavior of friends.

Date & time: 17 July 2025, 13:00-14:30

Venue: B609, Yifu Information Technology Building, Central Campus, Shandong University