Abstract
Interoception is the sensing of physiological signals originating inside the body, such as hunger, pain and heart rate. People with greater sensitivity to interoceptive signals, as measured by, for example, tests of heart beat detection, perform better in laboratory studies of risky decision-making. However, there has been little field work to determine if interoceptive sensitivity contributes to success in real-world, high-stakes risk taking. Here, we report on a study in which we quantified heartbeat detection skills in a group of financial traders working on a London trading floor. We found that traders are better able to perceive their own heartbeats than matched controls from the non-trading population. Moreover, the interoceptive ability of traders predicted their relative profitability, and strikingly, how long they survived in the financial markets. Our results suggest that signals from the body - the gut feelings of financial lore - contribute to success in the markets.
Highlights
Physiologists often use the term ‘gut feeling’ as a colloquial synonym for any interoceptive sensation that guides behaviour
In a multiple regression model predicting heartbeat detection score, we found that a lower body mass index (BMI), a lower heart rate (HR), and a lower root mean square of successive differences (RMSSD) in R-R heartbeat intervals
Our findings suggest that the gut feelings informing this decision are more than the mythical entities of financial lore - they are real physiological signals, valuable ones at that
Summary
Physiologists often use the term ‘gut feeling’ as a colloquial synonym for any interoceptive sensation that guides behaviour. Antoine Bechara and Antonio Damasio have observed that high-risk choices made on the Iowa Gambling Task are accompanied by rapid and subtle physiological changes – for example, sympathetic skin response - which they call ‘somatic markers’[14] Such autonomic responses feedback on the brain to bias our decisions, steering us away from gambles with negative expected returns and towards ones with positive expected returns. Gut feelings are valuable guides when taking risks People vary in their ability to generate and sense interoceptive signals, an ability that can be measured by various physiological tests, the most common being heartbeat detection[17,18,19,20,21]. A mid-sized hedge fund in the City of London to test the hypothesis that traders with a greater ability to sense signals from their bodies do make more money
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