What makes institutions ‘real’? One central notion has been emerging recently in sociology, which is ‘performativity,’ a term borrowed from the philosophy of language. I propose a neurolinguistic approach to performativity that is based on John Searle’s theory of institutions, especially his concept of a ‘status function’ and his explanation of rule-following as a neurophysiological dispositions. Positing a status function is a performative act. I proceed in two steps to establish the neurolinguistic framework. Firstly, I apply the concept of ‘conceptual blending’ borrowed from cognitive science on the status function, and give empirical applications from the research on performativity in financial markets. Second, I sketch the underlying neuroscience framework following the neural theory of metaphor, which I illustrate empirically with examples from behavioral finance and neuroeconomics.