  People differ in how they attend to, interpret, and respond to their
surroundings. Convergent processing of the world may be one factor that
contributes to social connections between individuals. We used neuroimaging and
network analysis to investigate whether the most central individuals in their
communities (as measured by in-degree centrality, a notion of popularity)
process the world in a particularly normative way. We found that more central
individuals had exceptionally similar neural responses to their peers and
especially to each other in brain regions that are associated with high-level
interpretations and social cognition (e.g., in the default-mode network),
whereas less-central individuals exhibited more idiosyncratic responses.
Self-reported enjoyment of and interest in stimuli followed a similar pattern,
but accounting for these data did not change our main results. These findings
suggest that highly-central individuals process the world in exceptionally
similar ways, whereas less-central individuals process the world in
idiosyncratic ways.
