Photo: flickr
Do you have an expensive but uncomfortable pair of shoes or jeans at the back of your cupboard that you never ever wear, but you simply cannot throw away because to do so would be to admit defeat and recognise that you wasted a lot of money? If so, you are suffering from the sunk-cost bias or fallacy.
Help is at hand in the form of a new study by researchers at INSEAD in Singapore and The Wharton School at the The University of Pennsylvania. Andrew Hafenbrack and his colleagues claim that just fifteen minutes practice at mindfulness meditation reduces people's vulnerability to the sunk-cost bias - our usual tendency to persist with lost causes because of what we've already invested.
The researchers first surveyed 178 adults online and found that across the sample, a natural tendency to stay in the moment (called "mindful attention awareness") tended to correlate with being less prone to the sunk-cost bias.
Click on the link below to read the full article
Category(s):Mindfulness Meditation
Source material from British Psychological Society
