Individual tendency to spontaneously lie changes in function of social reputation and interoception

Corporeal awareness arises from the integration of exteroceptive signals (e.g. visual, tactile) from outside the body and interoceptive signals (e.g. cardiac, respiratory, gastric) originating inside the body. Various studies within the framework of embodied cognition have demonstrated that bodily signals can influence high order psychological and emotional processes, including social decision making. In a sample of 71 healthy participants (33 males) we examined whether individual differences in the capacity to read interoceptive and exteroceptive signals predicted participants’ behaviour in the ‘Temptation to Lie Card Game’, in which participants are tempted to lie to another person for financial gain, when reputation is at risk or not. As measures of interoceptive and exteroceptive accuracy, participants completed a heartbeat counting task, in which they counted their perceived heartbeats in a series of four blocks, and a variation of the body-scaled action task, in which they judged whether they could fit through projected doors varying in width and height. Overall participants told more egoistic (to increase their own payoff) than altruistic lies (to increase the other player’s payoff). Moreover, when participants believed their reputation was at risk (i.e. that their choices were transparent to the other player) they told significantly less egoistic and more altruistic lies then when their choices were secret. This effect was significantly moderated by interoceptive, but not exteroceptive accuracy. Specifically, participants with high interoceptive accuracy did not reduce the number of egoistic lies nor enhance the number of altruistic lies when their reputation was at risk. Finally, our results show a non-significant correlation between interoceptive and exteroceptive measures of accuracy. Together our findings suggest that although integrated, interoceptive and exteroceptive accuracy constitute distinct facets of corporal awareness and that only the interoceptive one shapes the type of honesty-related decisions social decision making explored in the present study by making people less concerned about their social reputation during honesty-related decision making.