Visceral states and social transmission bias: A social psychological perspective on financial decision-making.

Financial decisions are shaped by the body as much as by the mind. This paper links transient visceral states, such as hunger, thirst, fatigue, and pain, to the influence of socially transmitted signals. Existing work treats these as independent influences. We argue that they interact. By degrading the capacity for independent evaluation, visceral states raise reliance on the evaluations of others. Drawing on constructionist accounts of emotion, social decision neuroscience, and dual-process models, we explain why this amplification is specific to social cues rather than to salient cues in general. Five propositions follow, each with a discriminating prediction. Mindfulness and self-regulation enter as tests of the mechanism, not as remedies.