Embodied social decision-making: Enhanced physiological-behavioral coherence in individuals with higher interoceptive accuracy

Recent theories of interoceptive inference suggest that individuals use bodily signals to guide behavior, comparing predictive models of internal states with ascending interoceptive input. Although interoceptive accuracy has been shown to influence both decision-making and physiological activation, empirical evidence on how interoceptive abilities concurrently shape behavioral and physiological responses during socio-economic games, such as the Ultimatum Game, remains limited. This study explores the impact of interoceptive accuracy on decision-making and autonomic responses during a modified Ultimatum Game. Participants received offers with varying formats to modulate attentional engagement, while heart rate responses were recorded between offer presentation and decision-making. Results confirm previous findings that unfair offers evoke a stronger cardiac orienting response, especially when the attentional engagement was low. Importantly, interoceptive accuracy was positively related with coherent behavioral and physiological patterns: individuals were more likely to reject unfair offers and showed greater heart rate deceleration in response to them. These findings suggest that individuals with higher interoceptive accuracy integrate bodily feedback more effectively, resulting in heightened sensitivity to social norm violations. These data support the hypothesis that interoceptive precision enhances coherence across behavioral and physiological domains, particularly in socially normative contexts. This coherence is likely shaped by long-term social learning, pointing to the relevance of interoception in structuring adaptive behavior over time.