A cross-cultural EEG study of how obedience and conformity influence reconciliation intentions.

ABSTRACT: The study investigated the influence of conformity and obedience on intentions to help a child whose relative had caused harm to the participant's family during historical events of violence. Participants from Belgium, Cambodia, and Rwanda faced different social scenarios with two types of social influence and had to choose whether to respond helpfully. A multi-method and cross-cultural approach combining self-reports, behaviours, decision times (DTs), and electroencephalography (EEG) data was used. Participants explicitly reported being more influenced by authority (obedience) than by a group (conformity), a finding supported by faster DTs when following authority recommendations compared to either a group or an individual alone (compliance). However, behavioural and neural data showed no

SUBMITTER: Pech GP 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12101351 | biostudies-literature | 2025 May

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature