Social interoception: perceiving events during cardiac afferent activity makes people more suggestible to other people’s influence

Our judgements are often influenced by others’ views and opinions. While interoception is known to influence decision making, little is known about its role in social influence and particularly, the extent to which other people may influence our decisions. Here, across two studies, we examined for the first time how cardiac interoceptive impact, manipulated by presenting stimuli across different phases of the cardiac cycle, coupled with trait-like levels of interoceptive accuracy, modulate the degree to which participants change their mind about the perceived trustworthiness of faces when receiving feedback from others. Whilst interoceptive impact did not shape participants’ change of mind, we found an attenuation of change of mind specific to interoceptive accuracy. Individuals with higher interoceptive accuracy showed less change of mind when provided with discrepant social feedback, both in terms of several hundreds of others (study 1) as well as when provided by one other person (study 2). The finding that people with higher interoceptive accuracy are less suggestible to other people’s judgements highlights the importance of visceral states and their awareness during social interactions.