Cognitive biases and mindfulness

Abstract

In a study testing whether mindfulness decreases cognitive biases, respondents answered 22 standard cognitive bias questions to measure susceptibility to the endowment effect, overconfidence, mental accounting, anchoring, loss aversion, and 17 other biases, as well as the 14 questions of the Langer mindfulness survey (LMS), measuring the traits of novelty-seeking, novelty producing, and engagement. A portion of the respondents were randomly pre-assigned to a condition that induced mindfulness. On 19 of the 22 biases, those induced to be mindful were less likely to show the bias. They also scored higher on 11 of the 14 LMS questions. The method by which we induced mindfulness was unrelated to the context of the later questions, involving image comparisons and standard Langerian instructions to notice three new things. People can boost their decision-making abilities merely by increasing their mindfulness, with no need for meditation, psychological training, or statistical education.

Full text

ARTICLE
Cognitive biases and mindfulness
Philip Z. Maymin1✉& Ellen J. Langer2
In a study testing whether mindfulness decreases cognitive biases, respondents answered
22 standard cognitive bias questions to measure susceptibility to the endowment effect,
overconfidence, mental accounting, anchoring, loss aversion, and 17 other biases, as well as
the 14 questions of the Langer mindfulness survey (LMS), measuring the traits of novelty-
seeking, novelty producing, and engagement. A portion of the respondents were randomly
pre-assigned to a condition that induced mindfulness. On 19 of the 22 biases, those induced
to be mindful were less likely to show the bias. They also scored higher on 11 of the 14 LMS
questions. The method by which we induced mindfulness was unrelated to the context of the
later questions, involving image comparisons and standard Langerian instructions to notice
three new things. People can boost their decision-making abilities merely by increasing their
mindfulness, with no need for meditation, psychological training, or statistical education.
https://doi.org/10.1057/s41599-021-00712-1 OPEN
1Fairfield University, Fairfield, CT, USA. 2Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, USA. ✉email: pmaymin@fairfield.edu
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Introduction
Mindfulness as Langer has defined it (Langer,
1978,1989,2000) is simply the act of noticing new
things. When we notice or create novelty, we come to
recognize that answers are context-dependent. Thus, mindful
people should be less susceptible to cognitive biases and less likely
to use inappropriate heuristics.
The study of cognitive biases presumes that a person who
displays fewer biases is more “rational.”Kahneman (1994) notes
that rationality is often taken to be “synonymous with flawless
intelligence,”and summarizes both the narrow, technical defini-
tion of rationality as meaning internal consistency with formal
rules of logic, and the broader, non-technical definition as
meaning grossly suboptimal decisions. Haselton et al. (2015)
summarize the standard definition of cognitive biases as sys-
tematic deviations from rationality.
Being rational is seemingly good. Being mindful is seemingly
good. Yet the relationship between rationality and mindfulness
leads to an interesting paradox. Rationality as typically studied
(e.g. Oppenheimer, 2008) suggests a correct answer, without
regard to context. Mindfulness suggests multiple perspectives and
explicit context dependence.
For example, research participants have been asked (Moldo-
veanu and Langer, 2002a), which is more likely, spilling coffee or
spilling hot coffee? The “rational”answer depends on presuming
that the category “coffee”includes hot, iced, and warm coffee. Yet
for a hot coffee drinker, if hot coffee isn’t available, they might
choose hot tea or hot chocolate rather than iced coffee. The point
being that “hot coffee”is just a compound name for a beverage. If
we called it x and iced coffee y and asked, which is more likely to
be spilled, either answer could be rational. Furthermore, it is not
unreasonable for a subject to assume in the original question that
the questioner linguistically intended for “coffee”to mean all
kinds of coffee except hot.
Rationality can also be person-dependent: Margolis and Langer
(1990) argue, in effect, that the distinction between a motivated
behavior and an addiction or any other apparent irrationality may
well become blurred if one views the behavior in a mindful
manner, considering not just the costs but also the benefits of the
activity. Langer (1989, 2014) notes that behavior makes sense
from the actor’s perspective or else they wouldn’t do it: a person
who considers himself reliable, spontaneous, and trusting may be
viewed by others as rigid, impulsive, and gullible. When we are
being judgmental, we are being mindless.
Indeed, Langer and Newman (1979) argues that most
experiments in social psychology may be the result of the
mindlessness of the participants being studied, not the absence of
rationality. When the experimenter puts some strong cue in the
situation, participants often comply blindly. In one study, par-
ticipants listened to a speaker they had been told was either
warm or cold. Those who were ultimately influenced by the
initial label did not seem to process the content of what the
speaker actually said; they merely parroted the label they had
been told, mindlessly.
Moldoveanu and Langer (2002a) go even further and argue
that many biases in the literature may reflect mindlessness on the
part of the researchers themselves rather than actual cognitive
deficits of the subjects.
A variety of behavioral and cognitive biases have been iden-
tified in the literature (e.g. Kahneman, 2011 for a thorough
overview) for which most people do not answer with the
ostensibly rational choice. One such example is the following
question (ibid, p. 7):
Consider the letter K. Is K more likely to appear as the first
letter in a word OR as the third letter?
The fact that human brains more easily recall words starting
with the letter K than those having K in the third letter is
explained as an availability bias, by which humans estimate
likelihood based on the ease of recall, sometimes leading to error.
There are problems with this letter K example. The first is
simply a delightful curiosity: it turns out from a simple calcula-
tion using a standard online dictionary that there are in fact more
common words that start with the letter K than that have it in the
third position! So all of those who answered it “irrationally”were
in fact completely correct and completely rational. This is not a
major indictment on the experiment, since it can be replaced with
the letter R to be correct, and people will still answer in the same
way. However, it does serve to caution that whatever we deem
“rational”may in fact later turn out to be incorrect.
The second problem is playfulness. A mindful person, asked
such a question, might actually find it relatively easy and more
enjoyable to try to come up with third-letter K words, one of
which is literally part of the question: ask, like, likely, bake, cake,
fake, coke, joke, poke, etc. Then, even though they are still relying
on the availability heuristic to estimate the probability, they
would get the opposite answer.
The implication of the above two problems is that the
experimenter’sdefinition of rationality is possibly incorrect and
certainly circular if they assert that rational people are those who
answer this specific question in this specific way.
Wherever we use the word “rational”in what follows, we may
mentally replace it with the phrase “survey rational,”meaning
that people are answering survey questions in the way the
experimenter thinks is rational. We thus use the term in a tech-
nical, not a pejorative, sense, in appreciation of it being a highly
contested and discussed concept.
In short, the cognitive bias literature such as the ones cited
throughout this paper claims particular survey questions have
correct answers, yet most people answer incorrectly, by relying on
the wrong or overly simplistic heuristics. The mindfulness lit-
erature suggests, first, that more mindful people tend to be more
aware of context and possibilities, and thus less likely to rely on
the wrong heuristic inappropriately, and, second, that people can
be relatively easily induced into a mindful state. Thus, our central
question is: what would happen to the proportion of rational
answers if respondents are induced into a mindful state? Does
mindfulness reduce the incidence of behavioral and cognitive
biases?
Definitions of mindfulness
While a handful of earlier works such as Deatherage (1975)
used mindfulness in the Thera (1972) Buddhist tradition
referring to the abstract idea of coming “to know and under-
stand one’s own mental processes,”the earliest concrete or
systematic definition of mindfulness in the scholarly literature
appears to be Langer (1978), where mindfulness is oper-
ationalized as “that process of consciously making use of
information relevant to the situation”and interventions are
described that introduce novelty and drawing distinctions in
order to overcome mindlessness; in other words, mindfulness
is the act of noticing new things.
Two separate traditions of mindfulness later emerged that initi-
ally differed from the original Langer (1978)definition but over
time came more into line: the meditative and the psychometric.
Continuing the Deatherage (1975) line of research of clinical
applications of mindfulness meditation, Kabat-Zinn (1982)
defined mindfulness solely in the context of meditation as
“detached observation”in order to distinguish it from con-
centration meditation practices that involve focusing on a single
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object. The result of such mindfulness or awareness meditation
techniques was termed “bare attention”or “choiceless awareness,”
and explicitly included “an effort to avoid judgment or inter-
pretation,”in sharp contrast to the Langerian definition of
actively noticing new things. Later, Kabat-Zinn (1994), while still
keeping mindfulness tied to meditative practices, rephrased the
definition as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in
the present moment, and non-judgmentally.”While this comes
closer to Langer’sdefinition it still doesn’t spell-out the kind of
distinction-making and novelty-seeking that are the hallmarks of
Langerian mindfulness. To tell people “to pay attention on pur-
pose”may be an empty instruction because people are oblivious
to their own mindlessness.
The psychometric approach began with Brown and Ryan
(2003)’s Mindful Attention Awareness Scale, which differentiated
from Langerian mindfulness in attempting to measure internal
mental processes rather than actively focusing attention on
external stimuli. Later research in this vein included a host of
additional inventory questionnaires and surveys (e.g. Black, 2011
for a survey). Such scales tend to ask introspective questions of its
subjects regarding their ability to focus or be conscious of an
emotion, etc. In other words, they attempt to measure some
recent historical average of a person’s general state of mind-
fulness, but, unlike the immediately operational Langerian defi-
nition, they neither induce nor seek to induce mindfulness, and
thus are not useful either for our experimental intervention or our
post-survey measures of the Langerian components of
mindfulness.
The primary conceptual difference between these other two
strands of mindfulness research is attainability: both the medi-
tative and the psychometric literature asserts or assumes that
attaining mindfulness involves practice and training, while the
original and consistent Langerian definition notes that the state of
mindfulness can be achieved instantly. It is this unique and
operational feature of instant attainability that is crucial to our
present study.
Methods
Logic. The between-subjects study comprised one of three
types of interventions, a sequence of relatively standard ques-
tions measuring behavioral biases, and the standard Langer
mindfulness survey (LMS) (Pirson et al., 2018), all described
further below. As demographic information was rarely col-
lected in the original studies cited below, because demo-
graphics are not expected to play a role in the results, and
because the participants are randomly assigned to conditions
in any case, no demographic information was collected or
analyzed here either.
Design. The study randomly assigned participants to one of three
conditions:
Mindless. No warm-up section, going immediately to the Sce-
narios section of the survey.
Low Mindful. This condition had a warm-up section before
proceeding to the Scenarios section of the survey. The warm-up
section was very similar to that of the Mindful condition except
the differences between the pairs of photos was easier to spot.
Mindful. This condition had a warm-up section before pro-
ceeding to the Scenarios section of the survey. The intent of
this condition’s warm-up section was to induce Langerian
mindfulness into the subjects by guiding them into noticing
new things. They are asked to make a choice between two black
and white computer generated images with subtle differences,
to spot a hard-to-find difference between two photos, to
attempt to see both a vase and the faces in a standard optical
illusion, and to actively write down three new things in their
environment.
It is important to note that the interventions had no overlap in
either content or context with the later survey questions. In other
words, it is not a form of training or education or even priming
for improved performance.
Computed images. Both pairs of images were generated by
evolving a cellular automaton with a random 500-length starting
condition of black and white cells for 500 time steps. The Low
Mindful condition images used Wolfram (2002)’s elementary
cellular automaton rule 30, which appear approximately random
with some barely discernable triangles, while the Mindful images
used rule 110, which have obvious and different structures
in them.
Subjects in the Low Mindful group were allowed to skip this
question, but the Mindful group had a forced-choice design
intended to encourage respondents to continue looking for
differences.
Although the specific choices did not matter, they are reported
here for completeness.
Low Mindful Which image do you prefer?
You can skip this question
if you like. ,
A: 21
B: 14
(skip): 4
Mindful Which image do you prefer?
,
A: 17
B: 15
Spot-the-differences. In both conditions, respondents were asked
the same question and offered the same three choices, and
responses were required.
Can you spot the missing fruit?
A: Yes, I see the missing fruit
B: No, I don’t see the missing fruit
C: No, I don’t think there is a missing fruit
Again, although the specific choices did not matter, they are
reported here for completeness. (Can you spot both pairs of
differences? Hint: each condition does indeed have a missing
fruit.) To be able to use the same starting image with modified
versions of varying difficulty, the automated spot-the-differences
program of Maymin (2019) and Maymin and Maymin (2019)
was used.
Low Mindful A: 33
B: 2
C: 4
Mindful A: 26
B: 0
C: 6
Vases and faces. In both conditions, respondents were asked the
same question but offered slightly different choices, and responses
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were required. Again, although the specific choices did not
matter, they are reported here for completeness.
Low
Mindful
What can you see here?
A: I see a vase. A: 2
B: I see two faces. B: 0
C: I see both a vase and the two faces. C: 37
Mindful What can you see here?
A: I see the vase on the left and the
vase on the right, but no faces
anywhere.
A: 0
B: I see only the vase on the left, and
the vase and faces on the right.
B: 4
C: I see only the vase on the right, and
the vase and faces on the left.
C: 0
D: I see the vase and faces on the left
and the vase and faces on the right.
D: 28
Noticing new things. The essence of Langerian mindfulness is to
actively notice new things. In the Mindful condition, that is
precisely what this question asks of respondents. In the Low
Mindful condition, the language is tempered and allows for you to
notice anything, old or new.
This was a free-form text response field, so no proportions can
be measured. Instead, the word clouds visually summarize the
responses (ignoring stopwords such as the, etc.).
Low
Mindful
Look around where you are right
now, and try to notice three things
that you may or may not have
noticed before.
What are those three things?
Mindful Look around where you are right
now, and try to notice three new
things that you have never noticed
before.
What are those three things?
Subjects. Over a period of two weeks in early June 2020, a total of
109 anonymous people clicked on a publicly available link for the
survey, answered all of the required questions, and submitted
their results. There were only two missing values, one missing
Salzman test in the Mindful group and one missing LMS question
2(“I generate few novel ideas.”) in the Low Mindful group. The
random assignments resulted in 38 subjects in the Mindless
group, 39 in the Low Mindful group, and 32 in the Mindful
group. No demographic or personally identifiable information
was collected at any time. The link had been distributed on
various social media including LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter,
as well as by one-time postings to former undergraduate students.
The survey and the research project were verified as exempt by
the Institutional Review Board of Fairfield University to be in the
exemption category for benign behavioral interventions.
Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants
involved in the study.
Measures. These questions comprised the “Scenarios”portion of
the survey, with both the questions and possible answers always
presented in the same order. The traditionally “survey rational”
responses are in bold.
They were followed by the LMS14 questions. Pirson et al.
(2018) document the development, validation, and reliability of
the LMS14 scale.
Loss aversion. People tend to feel the pain from losses twice as
much as they feel the pleasure from gains (e.g. Kahneman and
Tversky, 1991 and Rabin, 2000).
Here, they are asked to choose between $20 for sure, and a
gamble with an expected value of $100 and a loss-averse value of
$50 (loss-averse values can be calculated as expected values after
doubling the magnitudes of the losses).
The gamble is the rational choice; a person who rejects many
such bets sequentially is almost surely under-earning.
1. Suppose you had to choose one of these two options. Which
would you prefer?
a. You get $20 for sure.
b. You toss a fair coin. Heads you get $300. Tails you
lose $100.
Hyperbolic discounting. People tend to view “now”as special
(e.g. Green and Myerson, 2004). We tend to make a rational
tradeoff based on the implied 20% interest rate for 1 month when
choosing between receiving $1500 in 10 months vs. $1800 in
11 months, and we’d almost surely choose the latter, but if we fast
forward 10 months, “now”feels substantially different than “a
month from now,”and we often end up choosing the traditionally
less rational choice of $1500 today. This could potentially result
in a money pump: if I borrow $1600 from you today to repay you
$1800 in a year, then if after 11 months I offer to pay you $1500,
if you indeed act as the irrational choice below indicates, then you
will have lost out on $100 plus foregone interest.
2. Would you prefer to receive $1500 today or $1800 1 month
from now?
a. $1500 today
b. $1800 1 month from now
Conjunction fallacy. In certain cases, people erroneously view a
specific event as more likely than a more general event. The idea
that Linda is a feminist matches what we know about her.
However, a feminist bank teller is also a bank teller. There’sno
way Linda is more likely to be a feminist bank teller than to be a
bank teller.
While many of the standard examples used in this survey have
been criticized on various grounds, perhaps none have been
criticized as much as the Linda fallacy here (e.g. Hertwig and
Gigerenzer, 1999). The main objection has typically been that the
results are highly sensitive to changes in word choice. This
criticism is accurate. Rephrasing the question to prime or educate
respondents to evaluate the situation in terms of Venn diagrams
and proportions does mitigate the effect. Moldoveanu and Langer
(2002b) further argue that respondents choosing among state-
ments describing possible worlds rather than a single world are
answering perfectly rationally from a Bayesian perspective, and
respondents choosing among possible scientific explanations are
answering perfectly rationally from a Popperian perspective.
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Nevertheless, for the purposes of our study, we are exploring
whether induced Langerian mindfulness by itself, with no specific
education or priming about the actual questions, situations, or
biases, can in fact increase the responses of the traditionally
rational choice.
3. Linda is 31 years old, single, outspoken, and very bright.
She majored in philosophy. As a student, she was deeply
concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice,
and also participated in anti-nuclear demonstrations.
Which is more probable?
a. Linda is a bank teller.
b. Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist
movement.
Mental accounting. Although money is fungible, people often
compartmentalize earnings into different mental accounts (Tha-
ler, 1999). Specifically, traditional economic modeling suggests
that people have optimized their lifetime consumption and sav-
ings choices at the margin, so that an unexpected financial
windfall should be largely saved for the future rather than spent
today. While there is no exact right or wrong answer below, we
will be comparing the percentage of the windfall earmarked for
retirement across the conditions.
4. Suppose you just unexpectedly came into $1000. How
much would you put away into your savings for your
retirement? Please choose whichever option below is closest
to your answer.
a. $0—nothing into savings for retirement
b. $250 into retirement
c. $500 into retirement
d. $750 into retirement
e. $1000—all of it into savings for retirement
Anchoring. People tend to anchor to early even unjustified
estimates (Tversky and Kahneman, 1974). In this series of
questions, people are asked first to consider whether a number is
higher or lower than (effectively) a random number. The correct
answer, in fact, is $14 million (AP, 2008). We will compare the
differences between early-birthday (15th of the month or earlier)
guesses and late-birthday (16th of the month or later) guesses
across the conditions, normalized to percentages of $15 million.
5. What day of the month is your birthday (1–31)?
6. Let’s call that number you wrote above “X”. So X is the day
of the month you were born. Please think about that
number in terms of millions of dollars. In 2008, Brad Pitt
and Angelina Jolie sold the rights to the baby photos of
their children to two celebrity magazines, with the proceeds
going to charity. Without looking it up, do you think they
sold the photos for more, or less, than $X million?
Remember that X is your number from above.
a. More
b. Less
7. Without looking it up, what’s your best guess of how much
they sold the rights for, in millions of dollars? Please write
the number that represents your best guess; for example, if
you think it is $15 million, type in 15.
Gambling fallacies. Tossing a fair coin a few times should not
substantially change our assessment of the next coin toss, but it
often does. People who expect a surprising but short run of heads
to continue are performing a hasty generalization. People who
expect it to turn around because tails is somehow “due”are
operating under the gambler’s fallacy (Oppenheimer and Monin,
2009).
8. If you take a coin that you happen to have out of your
pocket, and you toss it high in the air in five times, and it
surprisingly comes up heads all five times, what do you
think will happen if you toss it one more time?
a. More likely to come up tails
b. Equally likely to come up heads or tails
c. More likely to come up heads
Confirmation bias. The Wason (1968) selection task highlights
the confirmation bias we have when looking for evidence relating
to a rule. When mindless, we tend to look for evidence con-
forming to what we believe, rather than looking to disprove our
hypothesis.
9. Below are four cards. You would like to evaluate whether
the following rule is true: “Any card that has a vowel on one
side will have an even number on the other side.”Turn over
only those cards that you need to, in order to check the rule.
a. Turn over card 3 only.
b. Turn over cards 1, 2, 3, and 4.
c. Turn over cards 3 and 4 only.
d. Turn over cards 1, 3, and 4 only.
e. Turn over cards 1 and 3 only.
Positional bias. Hill and Buss (2006)define positional bias as the
over-weighting of relative vs. absolute value, particularly in
deciding between two incomes.
It is true that living in a neighborhood where you are slightly
wealthier than average can have some advantages over living in a
neighborhood where you are slightly less wealthy than average.
Those advantages can possibly persist even if the second
neighborhood has a higher absolute amount of wealth. However,
if we limit the question to sufficiently similar opportunities where
cost of living and similar issues do not matter, the more rational
response would be to take the higher salary, all the more so if it is
at a firm with more growth potential.
10. Which of these two job offers would you prefer? Assume
there are basically no other differences between the two
opportunities.
a. A job paying $44,000 in a firm where the average
salary is $50,000
b. A job paying $42,000 in a firm where the average salary
is $38,000
Emotional attachment. Psychologically, there is a difference
between asking how much you would pay for a particular dog and
asking how much you would have to be paid to give up your dog,
and it is not unreasonable if mindful people exhibit a difference.
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For relatively fungible consumer items such as tickets, however, it
is irrational to refuse to sell, because you would not have paid this
much for the item, and if you sell it for such a large profit, you
can likely find a close substitute.
Kahneman et al. (1991) argue that the phenomenon in the
question below is an endowment effect, but Shu and Peck (2011)
have shown that emotional attachment can explain or mediate
many of the endowment effect findings in the literature, and
Martinez et al. (2011) show that inducing regret and disappoint-
ment can either eliminate or even reverse the endowment effect,
respectively. Thus, this is better viewed as an emotional
attachment question.
The question below focuses on the emotional attachment with
a strong reference to love.
11. A few days ago, you bought a ticket to a sold-out concert.
You really love their music and would have paid up to $500
for the ticket, but you got a great deal and were able to buy
it for only $200. Today, you notice that richer or more
desperate fans on the internet would pay up to $3000 for
your ticket. Would you sell it?
a. Yes, I would sell it
b. No, I would not sell it
Fairness. Raising the price of a good following a sudden boost in
demand increases the chance that the good goes to the highest
utility purchasers. In the example below, rather than just one
person purchasing the shovel to shovel their driveway and then
shove the shovel into their garage, maybe now it would be pur-
chased by an enterprising youth who would then offer to shovel
many people’s driveways. Kahneman et al. (1986) showed that
fairness considerations such as these restrict market pricing
mechanisms.
12. Your local hardware store has been selling snow shovels for
$15. This morning, after a very large snowstorm, the store
raises the price to $20. How would you rate this action by
the store?
a. Completely fair
b. Acceptable
c. Unfair
d. Very unfair
Availability bias. We think whatever is easy to recall is more
likely, and because it is far easier to recall words that start with
a certain letter than words that have a certain letter in the third
place, that could lead us to error. Recall the discussion in the
introduction that the original version of this standard question
(Kahneman, 2011, p.7) erroneously asked about the letter K.
13. Consider the letter R. Is R more likely to appear as the first
letter in a word, or as the third letter?
a. R is more likely to appear as the first letter in a word
b. R is more likely to appear as the third letter in a word
Equiprobability Illusion. This is a reworded example of the
Monty Hall problem, which has been explained variously as
relating to the endowment effect (Kahneman et al., 1991), status
quo bias (Samuelson and Zeckhauser, 1988), or omission vs
commission regret avoidance (Gilovich et al., 1995). It can also be
thought of as a failure to apply proper Bayesian updating or
conditional probabilities. Tubau et al. (2015) argue that it at least
partly represents an equiprobability illusion in which people
wrongly update all remaining options to be equally likely after the
elimination of a third option. The correct way to think of the
example below is to note that at the beginning, Al had a one-third
chance to be a pro. Bob beat Carl so Carl is definitely not the pro,
so the remaining two-thirds probability must go to Bob.
14. You see three people named Al, Bob, and Carl wanting to
play chess at a public park. You know that two of them are
equally ranked amateurs, and one is a pro who will always
beat either amateur, but you don’t know which one is the
pro. They ask you to match them up in a tournament. You
randomly guess that Al is the pro so you have Bob and Carl
face off first. Bob wins that game, and now will face Al for
the championship. If you had to bet, who do you now think
is the pro?
a. Al
b. Bob
c. Carl
Representativeness bias. When we evaluate a person based
almost solely on their stereotypical traits, we are engaging in
representativeness bias. We ignore the fact that there are far more
farmers than librarians, and Steve is far more likely to be a slightly
odd farmer than a stereotypical librarian.
15. An individual has been described by a neighbor as follows:
“Steve is very shy and withdrawn, invariably helpful but
with very little interest in people or in the world of reality.
A meek and tidy soul, he has a need for order and structure,
and a passion for detail.”Is Steve more likely to be a
librarian or a farmer?
a. Librarian
b. Farmer
Base rate neglect. It would be unreasonable to expect people to
accurately calculate the right answer, but our intuitions should
not lead us as far astray as they tend to here. We anchor to the
large 90 and 95% numbers and erroneously conclude that we
are quite likely to have the cancer identified by the screening
test. We ignore the base rate that it is in fact a very rare kind of
cancer.
16. There is a type of cancer that afflicts 0.1% of the
population. A screening test correctly identifies the cancer
90% of the time when it is truly there, and correctly
reports there is no cancer 95% of the time when it is truly
not there. You take the screening test and it reports that
you have the cancer. What is the probability that you
really do? Please pick the answer closest to your best guess
of the probability.
a. Definitely 0%—you do not think there is any chance you
have the cancer
b. Between 0 and 0.1%
c. Between 0.1 and 5%
d. Between 5 and 40%
e. Between 40 and 60%
f. Between 60 and 90%
g. Between 90 and 95%
h. Between 95 and 99.9%
i. Definitely 100%—you are completely sure you have
the cancer
Inattentional blindness. We often filter out short common words
when preoccupied with another task. Rayner et al. (2011) show
that short, predictable words are often skipped. For example,
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mindless people often miss the duplicate the in the following
phrase:
17. How many occurrences of the letter “F”are there in this
sentence: “FINISHED FILES ARE THE RESULT OF
YEARS OF SCIENTIFIC STUDY COMBINED WITH
THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.”
a. 1 b. 2 c. 3 d. 4
e. 5 f. 6 g. 7 h. 8
Overconfidence. When forecasting, we tend to be overly con-
fident in our first point estimate, failing to make the range around
it large enough (Russo and Shoemaker, 1992).
The standard deviation of high daily temperatures in New York
City is 10–15 degrees Fahrenheit. Thus, a proper two-standard-
deviation confidence interval around 70 would range from 40 to
100, or from 50–90. Either of those two answers counted as
“rational”here.
18. Suppose you had to predict the high temperature of the day
for New York City 2 months from now. Suppose your best
guess is that it will be 70 degrees Fahrenheit. What would
be the range of your estimate, so that you would be 95%
confident that the real temperature 2 months from now will
in fact be in that range?
a. 69–71
b. 65–75
c. 60–80
d. 50–90
e. 40–100
Endowment effect. This experiment is the clearest example of
an endowment effect (Langer, 1975 and Kahneman et al., 1990)
because it offers you the opportunity to double your chances of
winning without losing anything, particularly since neither you
nor the questioner even have knowledge, irrelevant as it may be
in any case, of what random numbers were on your ticket.
Furthermore, this experiment distinguishes from the concert
ticket question above, in which psychological ownership is tied
to a pre-existing emotional attachment. It is more in line with
van Dijk and van Knippenerg (1996)inthatthefuturevalueof
the exchange good is uncertain, by definition of being a lottery
ticket.
19. You just paid $1 for a lottery ticket with random numbers,
and you haven’t seen the numbers yet, when suddenly
someone offers to pay you $2 for your lottery ticket. (They
haven’t seen your random numbers yet either.) There is still
plenty of time for you to buy more lottery tickets before the
drawing. Would you sell your ticket for $2?
a. Yes b. No
Overdiversification bias. If the choices below were simply labeled
one through ten, we would probably recognize that the first five
are the optimal choices. However, with the coin toss involved, we
want to feel like we are “in it to win it,”which causes us to over-
diversify and choose some suboptimal tails.
20. There are two envelopes in front of you, one labeled Heads
and one labeled Tails. Each envelope has five poker chips
numbered from one to five. We’ll flip a fair coin, then draw
a random number from the indicated envelope. So there are
ten possibilities (Heads 1…Heads 5 and Tails 1…Tails 5),
but you can only pick three. If you correctly predict heads
and the right number, you get $3. If you correctly predict
tails and the right number, you get $2. Please select three of
these possibilities.
a. Heads 1 f. Tails 1
b. Heads 2 g. Tails 2
c. Heads 3 h. Tails 3
d. Heads 4 i. Tails 4
e. Heads 5 j. Tails 5
Leaping to conclusions. This question is essentially the Salzman
test (Turner, 2008). We often leap to our first conclusion. Instead,
being able to pause and attempt another solution can often reveal
that we are missing an important consideration. The correct
answer is the middle shape, the only one with no unique char-
acteristics: the first one is the only one with two bars, the second
is the only one with a thin border, the fourth is the only circle,
and the fifth is the only one with a white background.
21. Which of these does not belong? (There is only one correct
answer.)
a. A
b. B
c. C
d. D
e. E
Cognitive reflection. The Frederick (2005) cognitive reflection
tests consists of three problems, of which this is the first, that test
for people’s abilities to pause and re-evaluate their answers even
after being strongly cognitively pulled to a compelling first
response.
22. A bat and a ball cost $110 in total. The bat costs $100 more
than the ball. How much does the ball cost? Numerical
responses required.
Correct response: 5.
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Shallow thinking. If all people were perfectly rational and it was
common knowledge that all people were perfectly rational, the
only correct response would be zero in this version of the Nagel
(1995) game. In practice, the lower the guesses, the better they
tend to be, except for those who guess zero, as they are incorrect
in presuming that others are equally rational. Thus, rather than
comparing the proportion answering zero, we convert the
responses to percentages and compare their remainders when
subtracted from one, so that the computed number represents the
portion of the way towards zero, so that higher numbers corre-
spond to more rationality.
23. A lot of people are going to answer this survey. For this
question, they (and you) will all choose a number between 0
and 100. What do you think will be half the average of
everybody’s answer to this question? Please respond with a
number between 0 and 100.
Disposition effect. We often hold on to losing positions too long
(Shefrin and Statman, 1985). This disposition effect is a form of
sunk cost fallacy because if we were to accidentally sell out the
position, we would not later attempt to re-establish it, even
without transactions costs.
24. You bought one-hundred shares of a stock when it cost $50.
It now costs $30. You no longer like the stock: if you
weren’t already an owner of the stock, you would not want
to buy it now. What do you want to do with the shares that
you do currently own?
a. Hold on no matter what until the price gets back to $50
or higher, then sell
b. Sell now
c. Sell if it drops even lower to $15, or if it gets back up to
$50
Results
Mindless and Low Mindful were both Not Mindful. Table 1
below reports the average responses to each of the 14 questions of
the LMS (LMS14) for each of the three conditions Mindless,Low
Mindful, and Mindful, as well as for the combined Not Mindful
category comprising all respondents in either of the two non-
Mindful conditions.
The highlighted values in Table 1represent the eleven out of
the fourteen questions for which the Mindful responses were
above the Not Mindful responses. For ten of those eleven, the
Mindful responses were also greater than the higher of the
Mindless or Low Mindful conditions.
Under the null hypothesis that there is no difference between
Mindful and Not Mindful responses, relative to the alternative
hypothesis that Mindful responses should be higher, the
probability of randomly observing eleven out of fourteen in this
manner, i.e. 1
214 P14
k¼11
14
k

, is <2.87%. So we can reject the null.
Thus, it is reasonable to combine those two into a single Not
Mindful category, which we will do for the remainder.
In other words, there is effectively no difference between the
presumed mindless state of a typical respondent and the state
after a mild intervention. The results we will see for mindfulness,
therefore, do not arise from the activities of comparing photos,
spotting differences, or listing objects.
Respondents in the Mindful Condition became more Mindful.
The three primary traits measured by LMS14 and notated
alongside each question in Table 1are novelty-seeking, novelty
producing, and engagement. Table 2below summarizes those
traits.
Two of the three individual questions for which the Mindful
condition did not exceed the Not Mindful responses are in
engagement, and indeed the average Mindful engagement was
4.48 compared with 4.50 for the Not Mindful. Indeed, average
engagement hardly changed across any of the conditions. For the
two novelty traits, however, the Mindful averages of 5.56 for
novelty-seeking and 4.40 for novelty producing were each above
the Not Mindful averages of 5.40 and 4.09, respectively, and above
each of the Mindless and Low Mindful conditions, though not at
an individually statistically significant level.
Furthermore, since the Mindful intervention focused on
seeking and producing novelty, it is perhaps not a surprise that
engagement was unaffected overall. Future interventions could
attempt to increase engagement as well.
Mindful respondents were more “Rational”. Table 3shows the
average responses for each Scenario question. The average
Mindful response was higher, meaning it was more in line with
Table 1 Average responses and 95% confidence intervals to the Langer mindfulness survey 14 (LMS14).
Mindless Low Mindful Not Mindful Mindful
NS I like to investigate things 5.39 [4.92, 5.87] 5.44 [4.93, 5.94] 5.42 [5.08, 5.76] 5.72 [5.23, 6.21]
NP I generate few novel ideas [*] 2.82 [2.14, 3.49] 3.58 [2.97, 4.19] 3.20 [2.74, 3.65] 3.97 [3.37, 4.57]
NP I make many novel contributions 4.21 [3.65, 4.77] 4.18 [3.64, 4.72] 4.19 [3.82, 4.57] 4.47 [3.92, 5.02]
E I seldom notice what other people are
up to [*]
4.00 [3.47, 4.53] 4.41 [3.89, 4.93] 4.21 [3.84, 4.58] 4.00 [3.41, 4.59]
E I avoid thought provoking conversations [*] 4.55 [4.02, 5.09] 4.72 [4.24, 5.20] 4.64 [4.29, 4.99] 4.88 [4.34, 5.41]
NP I am very creative 4.53 [3.99, 5.07] 4.44 [3.88, 4.99] 4.48 [4.10, 4.86] 4.53 [3.96, 5.10]
NS I am very curious 5.50 [4.99, 6.01] 5.36 [4.88, 5.84] 5.43 [5.09, 5.77] 5.44 [4.86, 6.02]
NS I try to think of new ways of doing things 5.26 [4.78, 5.74] 5.33 [4.85, 5.82] 5.30 [4.97, 5.63] 5.47 [4.88, 6.06]
E I am rarely aware of changes [*] 4.74 [4.34, 5.13] 4.59 [4.09, 5.09] 4.66 [4.35, 4.97] 4.75 [4.38, 5.12]
NS I like to be challenged intellectually 5.50 [5.01, 5.99] 5.33 [4.83, 5.83] 5.42 [5.07, 5.76] 5.88 [5.43, 6.32]
NP I find it easy to create new and
effective ideas
4.63 [4.08, 5.18] 4.46 [3.87, 5.05] 4.55 [4.15, 4.94] 4.69 [4.08, 5.29]
E I am rarely alert to new developments [*] 4.71 [4.30, 5.12] 4.33 [3.81, 4.86] 4.52 [4.19, 4.85] 4.31 [3.88, 4.75]
NS I like to figure out how things work 5.50 [5.04, 5.96] 5.38 [4.89, 5.88] 5.44 [5.11, 5.77] 5.28 [4.69, 5.87]
NP I am not an original thinker [*] 3.97 [3.44, 4.51] 4.05 [3.48, 4.63] 4.01 [3.63, 4.40] 4.34 [3.78, 4.91]
The Not Mindful category merges the Mindless and Low Mindful conditions. Questions marked [*] had their numerical values xreplaced with 7 –x. Trait groups are notated as novelty-seeking (NS), novelty
producing (NP), or engagement (E). Questions for which the Mindful average exceeded the Not Mindful average are highlighted.
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the traditional rational answers, in nineteen out of the twenty-two
questions. In other words, yes, mindfulness increases rationality.
Figure 1plots the mindful rationality vs the mindless
rationality for each of the 22 questions, as well as the identity
line to visualize the differences. It also shows a cumulative count
of the number of biases for which either mindful or mindless
respondents scored better.
Following the same non-parametric estimation method above,
the probability of observing 19 or more heads out of 22 coin
tosses, 1
222 P22
k¼19
22
k

, is <0.04%, meaning less than one in two
thousand. Similarly, a regression of the 22 pairs of numbers yields
ap-value of 3% with a functional form that can be summarized
simply: for any bias measured on a scale of zero to one-hundred,
a mindful person scores ten points higher on average.
The statistical power of this test is the probability of properly
rejecting the no-difference null hypothesis when the improve-
ment alternative hypothesis is actually correct. The probability of
observing a higher mindful score than a non-mindful score, given
our sample sizes and a ten percentage point improvement as the
alternative hypothesis, is:
Pr m=32 >n=77 mBj32;:6
ðÞ
;nB77;:5
ðÞðÞ
¼0:83
where B(k,p) represents the binomial distribution with ktrials
having success probability p.
Therefore, the expected number of biases out of 22 to correctly
reflect a mindful improvement is: Ex
jxB22;0:83ðÞðÞ¼18:3In
a separate but similar analysis when comparing the performance
of all respondents grouped by their LMS14 scores, those scoring
above the mean outperformed those scoring below on 17 out of
the 22 biases. In other words, across all subjects, those who scored
as more mindful were also more “rational.”
Discussion
Mindfulness increased survey rationality in 19 of the 22 cognitive
biases. Furthermore, subjects induced to be mindful did in fact
become more mindful on the Langer mindfulness scale. In light of
this large effect and explanation, it is interesting to consider why
it did not appear to work in the three remaining biases.
Hyperbolic discounting. Approximately, 90% of even mindless
people answered that question rationally, leaving hardly any
room for improvement.
Emotional attachment. Note the difference between the emo-
tional attachment question in which respondents decided whe-
ther or not to sell their concert tickets at an inflated price and the
endowment effect question in which respondents decided whe-
ther or not to sell their lottery tickets at an inflated price. A
concert ticket indicates a pre-existing emotional attachment with
the band, the music, the culture, and the like. A lottery ticket does
not. While much psychological literature refers to both the con-
cert and lottery ticket as examples of the endowment effect, we
see here through the lens of mindfulness that they are different in
intensity.
Loss aversion. Mindful respondents reject positive expected value
gambles even more forcefully than mindless ones, opting for the
small sure thing instead. Perhaps probability assessments have
certain patterns of learning (e.g. Estes, 1976) that appear the same
as loss aversion among mindful participants. Alternatively, since
this question was the first one they were exposed to, and the sure
thing is the first option, and the subjects can see on the form that
there are more questions to follow, and the subjects understand
that it’s not real money anyway, and they correctly view it as a
contrived, context-less example, perhaps it is sensible for the
mindful subjects to simply answer with that first, sure option, and
go on to the more interesting and engaging and context-
dependent questions below.
Implications, limitations, and future research
Mindfulness increases rationality because it improves decision-
making by reducing behavioral biases. Moreover, the Langerian
method by which mindfulness is induced here is easy and quick:
just notice three new things. Incorporating mindfulness takes
virtually no time and is likely to increase the rationality of
decision-making by ten points on a one-hundred point scale.
One important potential limitation of this study is the absence
of demographic controls, at odds with recent experimental
Table 2 Average responses and 95% confidence intervals to the three traits of the Langer mindfulness survey 14 (LMS14).
Mindless Low Mindful Not Mindful Mindful
NS Novelty-seeking 5.43 [5.30, 5.56] 5.37 [5.32, 5.42] 5.40 [5.33, 5.47] 5.56 [5.26, 5.85]
NP Novelty producing 4.03 [3.13, 4.94] 4.14 [3.70, 4.59] 4.09 [3.41, 4.76] 4.40 [4.06, 4.74]
E Engagement 4.50 [3.95, 5.05] 4.51 [4.24, 4.79] 4.51 [4.17, 4.84] 4.48 [3.84, 5.13]
Traits for which the Mindful average exceeded the Not Mindful average are highlighted.
Table 3 Proportion of respondents answering rationally.
Not Mindful Mindful Difference
Loss aversion 44.16% 31.25% −12.91%
Hyperbolic discounting 89.61% 87.50% −2.11%
Conjunction fallacy 31.17% 53.13% 21.96%
Mental accounting 48.70% 58.59% 9.89%
Anchoring 19.18% 27.01% 7.83%
Gambling fallacies 83.12% 84.38% 1.26%
Confirmation bias 15.58% 21.88% 6.29%
Positional bias 76.62% 78.13% 1.50%
Emotional attachment 62.34% 46.88% −15.46%
Fairness 68.83% 75.00% 6.17%
Availability bias 48.05% 62.50% 14.45%
Equiprobability illusion 72.73% 78.13% 5.40%
Representativeness bias 37.66% 46.88% 9.21%
Base rate neglect 11.69% 15.63% 3.94%
Inattentional bias 40.26% 56.25% 15.99%
Overconfidence 48.05% 53.13% 5.07%
Endowment effect 63.64% 71.88% 8.24%
Overdiversification bias 45.45% 46.88% 1.42%
Leaping to conclusions 27.27% 28.13% 0.85%
Cognitive reflection 61.04% 75.00% 13.96%
Shallow thinking 70.82% 77.34% 6.53%
Disposition effect 29.87% 40.63% 10.75%
Positive differences between the Mindful and Not Mindful numbers are highlighted.
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literature that has shown that experimental results differ sig-
nificantly according to demographic characteristics such as age
class, employment vs. student status, gender, etc.. Future research
may show that such variables could make a difference to the
findings.
Loss aversion merits further, separate investigation. The stan-
dard question for that bias involves asking subjects to choose
between two prospects, some of which may be riskless and some
of which may involve risk or uncertainty or loss. This is an
arguably mindless way of looking at alternatives, but also very
consistent and clear, so could be a good testbed to see in what
cases and in what directions mindfulness impacts responses. That
future work should vary the order of the questions and answer
options, add context, and ask more questions with different
parameters.
Data availability
The datasets generated and analyzed during the current study are
available in the Wolfram Data Repository with UUID 1ad960b4-
04b4-4a2f-8763-86de337de18b.
Received: 31 July 2020; Accepted: 11 January 2021;
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Acknowledgements
We are grateful for useful comments, suggestions, and discussions to Stuart Albert, Peter
Aungle, Jay Olson, Francesco Pagnini, and Dasha Sandra.
Competing interests
The authors declare no competing interests.
Additional information
Correspondence and requests for materials should be addressed to P.Z.M.
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