Now, here’s the gamble: flip the coin. Heads, you win another $300. Tails, you hand over your $100 bill. Do you take the risk?
Mathematically, you should. One coin flip gives you two equally likely futures: in one, heads, you gain $300; in the other, tails, you lose $100.
Because each future has a 50 per cent chance of happening, you count half of each outcome: half of $300 is $150, and half of $100 is $50. Balance those against each other, and taking the gamble puts you $100 ahead on average. Decision scientists call this positive expected value.
Even when someone grasps the mathematics, however, it’s hard to take the risk. Why?
About 50 years ago, the psychologists Amos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman showed that this hesitation is not random. People depart from logic in patterned ways. One of the most durable patterns is loss aversion: our tendency to feel the pain of losing more sharply than the pleasure of an equivalent, or even greater, gain.
This is where mindfulness becomes interesting. Mindfulness is usually defined as paying attention to the present moment, on purpose, without immediately judging what is happening. In practice, that can mean noticing a thought before believing it, feeling an emotion before acting on it, or returning attention to the body, the breath, or the world around you. At its simplest, mindfulness creates a pause between what arises in the mind and what we do next.
That pause helps because many of our choices are made before we have fully examined them. We may think we are deliberating over the coin toss, but often the body has moved first: recoiling from loss or preserving a decision simply because we have already invested in it. These mental shortcuts are called cognitive biases, and the study of this kind of human misjudgment is central to decision science.
When we hesitate at the coin toss, we might be deliberating – but often, we’ve already decided.
Impulse has its benefits. A mind that had to reason from scratch every moment would be paralysed. But when these shortcuts override reflection, they can distort the decisions we make. Without careful thought, a patient may fail to seek the best medical care. People lose wealth because they cling to their current savings plans. You might know the feeling of preserving a job or a relationship simply because you invested so much in it. Internally, these cognitive biases feel instinctive. The question is whether we can catch these instincts before they harden into choices we mistake for reason.
I came to this question from two directions. I teach and research behavioural economics, where we study the systematic ways people depart from logic, and I also work as a licensed therapist, where I watch those same patterns play out in higher-stakes places: in relationships, in health, and in the stories people tell themselves about who they are. I have long been interested in the tension where a person knows better but cannot quite do better. Over time, I became less interested in theories of irrationality and more interested in what helps people catch themselves before their old reflexes take over.
Mindfulness kept appearing as an answer. But it was an imprecise one. If mindfulness means present-moment awareness without immediate judgment, what exactly is doing the work? Attention? Emotional steadiness? Curiosity? Acceptance? Biases do not all arise from the same source. Some are driven by emotional projection, some by inattention, and others by a failure to stay mentally engaged with a changing situation. So it would be surprising if one version of mindfulness could interrupt all biases in the same way. After all, what we call mindfulness is a cluster of distinct capacities: attention, nonreactivity, acceptance, curiosity and openness to novelty. Different biases may yield to different forms of the mindful state.
Loss aversion, for instance, may depend on how well we tolerate discomfort. Delay discounting, our tendency to overvalue immediate rewards, may depend on whether we’re attentive to change, nuance and emerging possibilities. Mental accounting – our habit of treating the same dollar differently depending on which mental bucket it lands in – may ease when we pay attention to all our money at once.
So, what are the different ways the mind slips off track, and how can mindfulness pull it back? To answer that question, it helps to distinguish the two strands that shaped modern mindfulness research. One is rooted in curiosity and active noticing, the other in meditative, nonreactive awareness.
The first school of thought is represented by the Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer, who believes that active noticing – engaging curiously with the environment – leaves us better equipped to deal with uncertainty and change. The second path comes from Jon Kabat-Zinn, who first encountered mindfulness through meditation. A PhD student in molecular biology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology back in the 1960s, Kabat-Zinn asked whether the Zen Buddhism, Vipassana and other forms of meditation he studied could be adapted to secular medicine. Not long afterward, he launched Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction and used meditation, yoga and other mindfulness practices to help patients relate differently to stress and chronic pain.
Put side by side, the contrast between the two versions of mindfulness is telling. Langer teaches us to open our eyes and notice something new. Kabat-Zinn teaches us to close our eyes, accept and let go. One form of mindfulness keeps us engaged with the world; the other helps us disengage from unhelpful inner patterns. Both begin with attention to the present moment, but they train attention to do very different psychological work. If biases arise from different sources, the kind of mindfulness that eases one may not touch another.
If it still feels abstract, try this thought experiment. Imagine that I’m a local researcher, and I’ve asked to meet you at your school or workplace. You walk down the familiar hall and sit at your usual spot. Surrounding you is the same flooring, windows and lights as usual. I want you to notice three new things that you’ve never noticed before.
It might not seem like much is happening, but actually you’ve just entered a much more mindful state. Following those instructions, you influenced how your mind was taking in the world around you. As you twisted your neck to find a chip of paint or a dusty corner, you interrupted your usual way of being in the moment and, instead, engaged with it. It may seem like I was just making you more aware of your surroundings. But, actually, I was switching off your autopilot – your mindlessness – and bringing you into the present moment, where details, nuance and context abide. Your brain probably didn’t feel that interrupted. But it followed this cognitive movement enough to reach a mindful state. It is mindfulness not as stillness, but as fresh contact with the world.
This is the novelty-noticing task designed by Langer. It triggers a specific form of mindfulness, and she and her team have shown how even a small shift in attention can change behaviour. [...]
Langer’s version of mindfulness reduced many biases – but not loss aversion. Why? Perhaps because loss aversion was never a cognitive problem to begin with. It’s an emotional one. It is about the heart’s deep reluctance to surrender the comfort of a long-term relationship, the certainty of a career path, or the belonging of a community. It’s the instinct to avoid difficult conversations, not because they won’t help, but because they might cost you comfort, approval or a sense of control. It is the reluctance to leave a life that no longer fits, because the shape of the old life still feels safer than the unknown.
That’s where Kabat-Zinn’s softer approach, focused on emotional regulation, comes in.
by Pam Weintraub, Aeon | Read more:
Image:Richard Baker/Getty Images
