Let go of your losses: How meditation can help you make better decisions
“Be here in the present moment.”
An instruction you hear time and time again in many meditation or yoga classes around the world. Although profound, it’s ubiquity, unfortunately, weakens its potency. But according to research co-authored by Sigal Barsade, a Wharton management professor, this simple piece of guidance could save you and your company a lot of time and money.
In their paper entitled ‘De-biasing the Mind through Meditation: Mindfulness and the Sunk-Cost Bias’, the authors aimed to determine whether meditation could reduce the bias towards making decisions based on past information that has no relevance to the present scenario. More specifically, they wanted to understand the relationship between meditation and the ability to avoid ‘sunk-cost bias’, or the “…tendency to continue an endeavour once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made.”
We’ve seen this time and time again in the organisations we’ve previously worked in and currently consult for. It’s difficult not to invest in a solution when you’ve put a lot of time and energy into its success, whether that’s a campaign you’re spearheading or a new product you’re launching. In this way, ‘sunk-cost bias’ illustrates how we, as humans, constantly interpret the present through the distortions of our past and how these distortions influence our ability to make wise decisions.
Meditation, as a practice, has been proven to assist people in self-regulating their attention to ensure its focused on the present. During our classes for our clients, we often guide people to watch when their minds become consumed by thoughts of the past or the present and gently direct it back to the present moment. Many studies have put participants through intensive meditation training in order to prove how meditation and meditative states can help us manage and overcome many psychological phenomena — from stress to implicit bias. However, the researchers felt as though this was impractical for many and wanted to see the effects that short meditations had on influencing sunk-cost bias.
To test this, the researchers set-up a series of decision making tasks and had one group of people listen to a 15-minute focused-breathing guided meditation before they completed the tasks and the other group who didn’t listen to a meditation.
The first pair of studies asked participants to choose one of two decision-making tasks. In one task, making an affirmative decision — in other words, the choice to do something — represented the resistance to the sunk-cost bias. In the other, a negative decision — or the choice to not do something — meant the individual had resisted the bias.
According to the authors, those in the study who had listened to the meditation were more likely to resist the sunk-cost bias than those who had not. “People who mediated focused less on the past and future, which led to them experiencing less negative emotion,” Hafenbrack says. “That helped them reduce the sunk-cost bias.”
“If you find yourself in a position where you need to change the way you’re thinking and be sure you’re thinking in a less biased way … meditation is a way to do that.” — Hafenbrack
This ability to pause, whether for five minutes or thirty, and not get lost in thoughts about the past or future before any important decision needs to be made is clearly critical. But yet when we find ourselves in a position where an important decision needs to be made we tend to do the complete opposite — we lean towards things that over stimulate us and ultimately distract us from the task at hand, whether that’s coffee, alcohol or social media. In essence, we become overwhelmed by the situation.
A useful way to think about this is by imagining your mind as the surface of a lake. When it’s busy, which our minds definitely are when making an important decision, every thought is like a rock being thrown into the lake — creating ripples that disturb the surface. Some rocks (thoughts) are small, like what you’re going to eat for lunch, and although they’re distracting they don’t disturb the lake (our minds) too much. But some rocks are huge, like judging ourselves as being too emotional or incapable of making the right decision, and they can create wave-sized ripples on the lake. However, beneath this frenetic surface is where our ability to make clear, wise decisions resides. It’s always there, it’s just harder to access when the constant movement of the water above is rough.
“Everyone always says ‘stop being emotional’ when they discuss decision-making, but in essence that’s the wrong thing to say. Just don’t let the wrong emotions cloud the decision-making process.” — Sigal Barsade
What meditation, and these pause moments, allow us to do is calm our minds to the point where we’re not overwhelmed by our emotions and can clearly see the decision that needs to be made. We’re practicing the ability to be internally calm and clear whether or not external conditions are calm and clear. And like any skill, whether learning a language or riding a bike, the only way we’ll get better at doing this is through consistent practice.
