The peculiarity of the leader's brain helps to persuade. Free Technical Library News

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The Leader Brain Feature Helps Persuade

01.04.2015

A leader must be able to convince people that he knows best and that he can be trusted. In other words, he must be able to find a common language with others.

Researchers from Beijing Normal University, together with the Max Planck Society and several other European and American research centers, decided to find out how this skill manifests itself in the activity of the human brain. The participants in the experiment were divided into groups of three (each consisted of either only men or only women), and each trio was asked to discuss a certain moral dilemma for several minutes.

Brain activity was monitored using near-infrared spectroscopy, which monitors changes in the level of hemoglobin associated with oxygen - where the brain works most actively, oxygen is consumed most there. After the discussion, the participants named the one who, in their opinion, turned out to be the leader of the group. At the same time, according to the recording of the conversation, the leader was to be determined by "independent experts" - outsiders who did not participate in the discussion and did not know any of the disputants.

In a PNAS article, Jing Jiang and her colleagues describe a curious phenomenon they found: a certain area of the cortex (namely the left temporoparietal commissure) began to work in unison in different people during the discussion. Moreover, synchronization took place in the brain of one of them, who was later recognized as the leader by both the participants in the discussion and those who listened to it in the recording. It is known that the temporoparietal commissure helps us to understand someone else's mental state, to delve into the emotions and thoughts of another person, therefore it can also be called the zone of empathy. (By the way, monkeys have the same area of the cortex, and it works, as researchers from Oxford recently showed, in exactly the same way, that is, it is tuned to empathic understanding.) Because the leader must simultaneously feel the mood of his group and influence emotions and the thoughts of other people, it is not surprising that the activity of this particular area of the cortex turned out to be associated with the appearance of a "respected person."

Synchronization occurred to a greater extent in verbal than in non-verbal communication, which is quite understandable: facial expressions, gestures and body language are usually only auxiliary means of communication for us, reinforcing what is said in words. What was important here was not how often a person opened his mouth during a discussion, but what he said. Some of the members of the group entered into the conversation very often, but not necessarily became the main ones, and only the words of the real leader, even if he did not speak very much, caused synchronization of cortical activity. That is, speech skills in and of themselves are clearly insufficient for a leadership position (by the way, the language centers of the cortex in different members of the group were “active” in their own way).

In what direction did the coordination of brain activity go - that is, in other words, who adjusted to whom? The process went both ways, but it was the leader's brains that synchronized with the others most of all. Entering into communication, the potential leader of the group had to somehow coordinate what he was going to say with the thoughts and feelings of other people. So his brain literally tuned in to someone else's wave. This does not mean that he adjusted to someone else's opinion and began to repeat it - it means that he understood and took into account someone else's position in his own words.

This is by no means the case that such brain activity is the cause of the emergence of a leader. The neurofunctional features described above are only indicative of what goes on in people's minds when a group singles out a person they trust and who can lead the others. Such a person can be detected even before the explicit election of the head of the community - simply by how brain activity changes in the course of group communication. Obviously, this ability is more of a human trait, although, perhaps, it began to evolve even in monkeys (after all, we recall that they can also feel the mental state of another). It is hoped that these results will also be of practical use: for example, neuroscientists and psychologists could create a test that allows brain activity to assess whether a candidate for leadership is worthy of taking the proposed position.

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