Lab of Action and Body, Department of Psychology, Royal Holloway, University of London, UK; Centre for the Politics of Feelings, School of Advanced Study, University of London, UK.
Center for Studies and Research in Cognitive Neuroscience, Department of Psychology, University of Bologna, Italy.
Cognition. 2023 Sep;238:105502. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2023.105502. Epub 2023 Jun 17.
Our judgements are often influenced by other people's views and opinions. Interoception also influences decision making, but little is known about its role in social influence and particularly, the extent to which other people may influence our decisions. Across two experiments, using different forms of social influence, participants judged the trustworthiness of faces presented either during the systolic phase of the cardiac cycle, when baroreceptors convey information from the heart to the brain, or during diastolic phase, when baroreceptors are quiescent. We quantified the extent to which participants changed their minds (as an index of social influence) following the social feedback, in order to compare two competing hypotheses. According to the Arousal-Confidence Hypothesis, cardiac signals create a context of heightened bodily arousal that increases confidence in perceptual judgements. People should, therefore, be less subject to social influence during systole. By contrast, according to the Uncertainty-Conformity Hypothesis, cardiac signals increase neural noise and sensory attenuation, such that people should display greater effects of social influence during systole, as they then underweight private interoceptive signals in favour of the external social information. Across two studies that used different kind of social interactions, we found that participants changed their minds more when faces were presented at systole. Our results, therefore, support the Uncertainly-Conformity hypothesis and highlight how cardiac afferent signals contribute to shape our social decision-making in different types of social interactions.
我们的判断往往受到他人观点和意见的影响。内脏感知也会影响决策，但对于它在社会影响中的作用，尤其是他人可能在多大程度上影响我们的决策，人们知之甚少。在两项实验中，我们使用了不同形式的社会影响，参与者判断呈现于心脏收缩期（压力感受器向大脑传递心脏信息）或心脏舒张期（压力感受器静止）的面孔的可信度。我们量化了参与者在收到社会反馈后改变主意的程度（作为社会影响的指标），以比较两种相互竞争的假设。根据“唤醒-置信度假说”，心脏信号会营造出一种身体唤醒程度升高的环境，从而增加对感知判断的信心。因此，人们在心脏收缩期应该较少受到社会影响。相比之下，根据“不确定性-从众假说”，心脏信号会增加神经噪声和感觉衰减，因此人们在心脏收缩期应该会受到更大的社会影响，因为他们会低估内部内脏感觉信号，而更倾向于外部的社会信息。在两项使用不同社交互动形式的研究中，我们发现当面孔出现在心脏收缩期时，参与者改变主意的频率更高。因此，我们的研究结果支持了“不确定性-从众假说”，并强调了心脏传入信号如何在不同类型的社交互动中影响我们的社会决策。
