In-group neural alignment serves as a biomarker of social identity.

Religious participants (n=21) showed significantly higher in-group neural synchrony than secular participants (n=21) across all content types and brain networks.

• Why it matters: The work addresses whether neural synchronization reflects more than shared understanding, testing if it can mark social homogeneity when explicit self-report measures show no group differences.
• What they did: The authors used fMRI to compare within-group variance in emotional response, agreement, and engagement while participants watched neutral and religion-relevant video narratives, then quantified in-group neural synchrony.
• The result: In-group synchrony predicted religious orientation with accuracy up to 92%, suggesting neural alignment can serve as a biomarker of group cohesion beyond explicit behavioral measures.

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