Mindfulness Meditation Can Help You Make Smarter Decisions by Christopher Bergland

Journalists simplify empirical research findings into consumer news stories by summarizing the study into interesting, nontechnical terms for the general public, potentially resulting in misleading information that deviates from the findings of the research (Morling, 2012). In the popular press article, "Mindfulness Meditation Can Help You Make Smarter Decisions", Christopher Bergland (2012) suggests that brief sessions of meditation can result in making "smarter" decisions. Bergland based this claim on a an empirical study conducted by Andrew Hafenbrack, Zoe Kinias, and Sigal Barsade, published in the peer-reviewed Journal of Psychological Science (2014). This article (Bergland, 2014) proposes that doing meditation prevents succumbing sunk cost bias, defined in the peer-reviewed article (Hafenbrack et al., 2014) as the propensity to continue and endeavor after money, time, or effort has been invested. Though Hafenbrack (2014) accurately portrays the findings of the study, the article puts too much of an emphasis on the conclusions while essential details from the methods are left out, potentially misleading readers.

In a multipart experiment, Hafenbrack et al. (2014) devoted Study 1 to establishing a positive correlation between mindfulness meditation and resisting suck cost bias. However, the popular press article is centered around studies 2, 3, and 4 of the experiment, all of which make causal claims (Bergland, 2014). In his article, Bergland (2014) correctly indentifies the testing of causal hypotheses by Hafenbrack et al. (2014); however, he fails to mention that the first of the four studies makes an association claim and incorrectly categorizes it as a causal claim. While this inaccuracy does not ...

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...y associated with the study, leaving looming questions of statistical significance, construct validity and internal validity. Consequently, I deem "Mindfulness Meditation Can Help You Make Smarter Decisions" as a meager portrayal of the Hafenbrack et al. empirical study.

Works Cited

Christopher, B. (February 13, 2014). Mindfulness meditation can help you make smarter decisions. Psychology Today. Retrieved from http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/the- athletes-way/201402/mindfulness-meditation-can-help-you-make-smarter-decisions

Hafenbrack, A. C., Kinias, Z., & Barsade, S. G. (2014). Debiasing the mind through meditation: Mindfulness and the sunk-cost bias. Psychological Science, 25(2), 369-376. doi:10.1177/0956797613503853

Morling, B. (2012). Research methods in psychology: Evaluating a world of information. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.