Mindfulness Meditation Can Help You Make Smarter Decisions...

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†¦show more content†¦The causal claim in studies 2, 3, and 4 hypothesized that listening to a 15 minute mindfulness meditation tape would result in more frequent resistance of cost bias when compared to a mind-wandering tape, the control condition (Hafenbr ack et al., 2014). A major fault in Berglands (2014) article is he presents very limited information about the methods of the study. His description provides that two groups listened to a fifteen-minute tape, to establish either a state of mindfulness or mind-wandering, and were subsequently asked to answer a question that involved a sunk cost decision (Bergland, 2014). Concerning internal validity, there is no discussion of how the study controlled for confounding variables. Consequently, readers cannot determine if the increased resistance to sunk cost bias was caused by being in a state of mindfulness or a confounding variable that may not have been accounted for. Interrogating construct validity, how well the variables in the study were manipulated and measured, is also essential when dealing with causal claims (Morling, 2012). Again, because so little information from the methods section was addressed in Berglands (2014) article, readers cannot validate the construct validly of the study. It would have been