The impact of mindfulness on decision making Biases

• Autor(a) principal: Fontoura, Joana Caxaria
• Data de Publicação: 2017
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10400.14/22759
• topic: Mindfulness; Decision making; Overconfidence; Endowment effect; Hindsight bias; Organizational behavior; Tomada de decisões; Enviesamentos cognitivos; Excesso de confiança; Efeito de doação; Enviesamento de retrospetiva; Comportamento organizacional; Domínio/Área Científica::Ciências Sociais::Economia e Gestão

This dissertation investigates the impact of mindfulness meditation on decision making biases. It was hypothesized that mindfulness would be positively correlated with resisting decision making biases and that an eight-minute mindfulness-inducing recording would effectively decrease biased decision making. These hypotheses were tested in three separate studies: a survey and two experiments. The correlational nature of Study 1 aimed at demonstrating a negative relationship between mindfulness and overconfidence, the endowment effect and hindsight bias. However, empirical support was only found for the relationship between mindfulness and overconfidence. Given such, Study 2 was an experiment that focused on the impact of mindfulness on reducing overconfidence. Surprisingly, the opposite directionality was verified, with results indicating that mindfulness increased confidence levels. Study 3 further explored this angle, by including additional measures of overconfidence and hypothesizing that positive affect could play a role in mediating the relationship between mindfulness and overconfidence. Although mindfulness did increase positive affect, which in its turn increased overconfidence, a main effect linking mindfulness and overconfidence could not be found. All in all, mindfulness and overconfidence are correlated on the trait level but inducing state mindfulness has shown no effect in changing confidence. This could be the case if overconfidence is difficult to influence being it is such an ingrained bias. Keywords: Mindfulness, decision making, biases, overconfidence, endowment effect, hindsight bias, organizational behavior.