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Posts Tagged ‘meditation’

Meditating on Those Sunk Costs

The sunk-cost fallacy leads to all sorts of poor decision-making — like staying too long at a bad job or refusing to drop out of a hopeless mayoral campaign.  Here’s how Dubner explained it in our podcast on quitting:

A “sunk cost” is just what it sounds like: time or money you’ve already spent. The sunk-cost fallacy is when you tell yourself that you can’t quit because of all that time or money you spent. We shouldn’t fall for this fallacy, but we do it all the time.

But there’s new hope for all you sunk-cost believers out there: new research (abstractPDF) from Andrew C. Hafenbrack, Zoe Kinias, and Sigal Barsade shows that a 15-minute mindfulness meditation practice can help.



Can Crime Be Meditated Away?

Okay, how’s this for an example of crime prevention: transcendental meditation. Several years ago in Washington D.C., 3,000 people got together to meditate and … yes, drove drown crime throughout the city. That’s their story, at least. For all I know, this is an old story; it may also be totally insane. But it makes for interesting reading: click here . . .