Reducing Choice-Blindness? An Experimental Study Comparing Experienced Meditators to Non-Meditators

Abstract

The mindfulness trait is an intrinsic characteristic of one’s disposition that facilitates awareness of the present moment. Meditation has proven to enhance situational awareness. In this study, we compared the performance of participants that were split into two groups depending on their experience in mindfulness meditation (a control group naive to mindfulness meditation and a group of experienced mindfulness meditators). Choice-blindness happens when people fail to notice mismatches between their intentions and the consequences of decisions. Our task consisted of decisions where participants chose one preferred female facial image from a pair of images for a total of 15 decisions. By reversing the decisions, unbeknownst to the participants, three discrepancies were introduced in an online experimental design. Our results indicate that the likelihood of detecting one or more manipulations was higher in the mindful group compared to the control group. The higher FMI scores of the mindful group did not contribute to this observation; only the practice of mindfulness meditation itself did. Thus, this could be explained by better introspective access and control of reasoning processes acquired during practice and not by the latent characteristics that are attributed to the mindfulness trait.