Answer:
Social influence is ubiquitous in human societies. It takes a wide variety of forms, including obedience, conformity, persuasion, social loafing, social facilitation, deindividuation, observer effect, bystander effect, and peer pressure. Research on social influence has a long history in social psychology, and an experiment on social facilitation effect that was conducted in 1898 by Triplett [1] is often considered the first social psychological experiment (see also Ref. [2]). Since then, social influence has fascinated scholars in various fields.
Since 2005, researchers in the emerging and growing fields of social neuroscience, neuroeconomics, and neuromarketing have begun to explore the neural bases of such complex social phenomena using methods in cognitive neuroscience including functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), electroencephalography (EEG), and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). In this chapter, I will cover social neuroscience and neuroeconomics studies investigating the following two forms of social influence: (1) the effect of others' presence on prosocial behavior (observer effect) and (2) the effect of others' opinion on an individual's preference (social conformity). Both the observer effect and social conformity can be considered primary examples of social influence, as they represent two of the most relevant and ubiquitous forms of social influence in our everyday social lives.
(hope makatulong)
