The power of social influence on (moral) decision-making and its resistance: A scoping review of behavioral effects and neural mechanisms

While social influence has been extensively studied in psychology, neuroscientific research on how these processes are represented and regulated in the brain remains in its early stages and has rarely been systematically compared across studies. Notably, in addition to the lack of comparative studies, existing research rarely provides clear and unified insights into how social influence affects (non-) moral decision-making. This limits the ability to develop an integrated model to understanding the various forms of social influence. This pre-registered scoping review aims to provide a novel theoretical framework based on a timeline on how and when various forms of social influence - social presence, conformity, compliance, and obedience - modulate decision-making processes. For each form of social influence, we will review the mechanisms involved in the pre-decision phase, the decision-making phase, and the post-decision phase, and how each of them influences related behaviors. We will also highlight critical gaps in the existing literature and propose future research directions. The present work proposes the first pre-registered scoping review to jointly examine these processes, with the goal of constructing a coherent, temporally structured account of the neural mechanisms underlying social influence in human decision-making.