Friend advice influences mate choice through brain-to-brain synchrony and computational decision processes

Individuals often rely on friends’ advice when making mate-choice decisions under uncertainty, yet how such advice is integrated into decision-making remains unclear. Using fNIRS hyperscanning, we simultaneously recorded neural and behavioral activity from 66 adult friend dyads (33 female dyads) during interactive advice phases. Only the bidirectional Social Information Processing (SIP) computational model best fit the behavioral data, indicating that social influence arises from reciprocal interaction rather than one-way transmission.

Behaviorally, positive advice from in the relationship advisors increased mate-choice intention, whereas negative advice from single advisors more strongly influenced decision-making. Both conditions elicited enhanced interpersonal neural synchrony (INS) in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), linked to risk evaluation, and in the left superior and middle temporal gyri (l-STG, l-MTG), associated with semantic processing and value transformation. Machine learning analyses showed that task-level INS robustly forecasted overall advice influence.

Together, these findings demonstrate that friend advice influence emerges from dynamic brain-to-brain alignment in control and semantic networks—reflecting emotional sharing during positive advice and risk re-evaluation during negative advice. This study extending SIP theory to interactive decision-making and revealing how friend advice influence mate-choice decision. This work was supported by the Ministry of Science and Technology of China, National Key R&D Program of China (2023YFC2506800), the National Social Science Fund of China (25FSHB040), Natural Science Foundation of Hebei Province (C2025209005), Social Science Foundation of Hebei Province (HB24JY027), Key Cultivation Project for Basic Research in Humanities and Social Sciences by the Hebei Provincial Department of Education(JCZX2026024),Education and Teaching Reform Project under the Teaching Guidance Committee for Psychology-related Majors in Higher Education Institutions of the Ministry of Education(20251030), Hebei Provincial Graduate Demonstration Course Construction Project (KCJSX2025055), The post-project funding for humanities and social sciences in North China University of Science and Technology (2024SKHQ10, 2024SKHQ16), The Graduate Student’s Innovation Fund of North China University of Science and Technology (2025S29) and The Talent Cultivation Project for Master’s Students majoring in Applied Psychology of “Feiyuxing”(HLFYX2024005).

School of Psychology and Mental Health, North China University of Science and Technology; Hebei Key Laboratory of Mental Health and Brain Science, Tangshan, Hebei Province, China Rui Huang, Jinru Jiang, He Wang, Xiujun Zhang, Haitao Wang & Yingjie Liu Key Laboratory of Modern Teaching Technology, Ministry of Education, Shaanxi Normal University, Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, China School of Business and Management, Shanghai International Studies University, Shanghai, China Correspondence to He Wang or Yingjie Liu. The authors declare no competing interests. Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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