“A new study in the journal Neuron shows when people hold an opinion differing from others in a group, their brains produce an error signal. A zone of the brain popularly called the “oops area” becomes extra active, while the “reward area” slows down, making us think we are too different.
“We show that a deviation from the group opinion is regarded by the brain as a punishment,” said Vasily Klucharev, postdoctoral fellow at the F.C. Donders Centre for Cognitive Neuroimaging at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands and lead author of the study. “
This explains so much about weird self-conscious hipster social gatherings: everyone’s looking at each other, pretending that they’re not looking at each other, trying to gauge themselves against everyone else. The sort of thing that makes me want to just stay home.
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