The Impact of Friendship on Neural Synchrony and Consumer Behavior

Recent research highlights how close social relationships, particularly friendships, influence brain activity and behavioral patterns. A study published in the Journal of Neuroscience by Jia Jin and colleagues from Shanghai International Studies University investigated the neural and behavioral effects of friendship. The study combined long-term behavioral experiments with neuroimaging data from 47 participants and behavioral assessments involving 175 individuals.

The findings reveal that friends tend to evaluate products more similarly than strangers, and this similarity intensifies as their friendship deepens. Neuroimaging results showed synchronized neural activity when friends viewed advertisements together, particularly in brain regions involved in perception, attention, memory, social judgment, and reward processing. Notably, neural activity patterns observed could predict not only an individual's purchasing intentions but also those of their friends.

This research advances our understanding of how dynamic social bonds shape behavior predictably. The study suggests that close relationships can significantly influence consumer decisions by aligning neural responses and behaviors, emphasizing the importance of social context in behavioral science.

For more details, see the original study: Neural Synchrony and Consumer Behavior: Predicting Friends' Behavior in Real-World Social Networks, in the Journal of Neuroscience (2025). Source: https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-07-friendship-neural-behavioral-similarity.html