Brief mindfulness meditation increases risk-taking behavior
Tan, Lucy B.G., Golubickis, Marius, and Macrae, C. Neil (2026) Brief mindfulness meditation increases risk-taking behavior. Scientific Reports, 16 (1). 6760. pp. 1-34.
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Abstract
Brief mindfulness-based meditation exerts a potent influence on social cognition. What is not yet understood, however, is whether and how it impacts an important facet of daily life—risk taking. Specifically, it is unclear the extent to which a single episode of mindfulness meditation shapes risk-taking behavior. Addressing this issue, here we examined the effects of mindfulness meditation on risk taking using two established experimental paradigms (i.e., Expt. 1: Balloon Analogue Risk Task; Expt. 2: Bomb Risk Elicitation Task), participants from different cultural milieus (i.e., Expt. 1: UK; Expt. 2: Singapore), and varied testing environments (i.e., Expt. 1: on-line; Expt. 2: in-person). A consistent pattern of results emerged across the experiments. Compared to both active and passive control conditions, brief mindfulness-based meditation increased risk-taking behavior. Of theoretical significance, additional computational analyses traced the origin of this effect to a reduction in loss aversion during decisional processing. The implications of these findings are considered.
| Item ID: | 91885 |
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| Item Type: | Article (Research - C1) |
| ISSN: | 2045-2322 |
| Keywords: | Computational modeling, Decision-making, Loss aversion, Mindfulness, Risk taking |
| Copyright Information: | © The Author(s) 2026. This article is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License, which permits any non-commercial use, sharing, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence, and indicate if you modified the licensed material. You do not have permission under this licence to share adapted material derived from this article or parts of it. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the article’s Creative Commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. To view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/. |
| Date Deposited: | 20 Jul 2026 04:57 |
| FoR Codes: | 52 PSYCHOLOGY > 5204 Cognitive and computational psychology > 520499 Cognitive and computational psychology not elsewhere classified @ 100% |
| SEO Codes: | 28 EXPANDING KNOWLEDGE > 2801 Expanding knowledge > 280121 Expanding knowledge in psychology @ 100% |
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