Originally based on Buddhist practices, mindfulness can be described as the act of becoming open and present in the current moment. The practice made its way over to the West after Jon Kabat-Zinn began the Center for Mindfulness in Massachusetts where he offered a course lasting 8 weeks to help reduce stress. Researchers have had a growing interest in how mindfulness can benefit us and so far they’ve found that it can help with dementia, chronic fatigue syndrome and anxiety. For my thesis, I was interested in understanding if it could help lower risk-taking levels as it has been shown to treat gambling quite well. Part of the issues surrounding addiction and furthermore, gambling is that individuals experience negative urgency. This term describes when someone is feeling unhappy or distressed and then acts impulsively in an attempt to quickly alleviate those negative emotions.
Our expectation was that the participants who completed the mindfulness session would show lower levels of risk-taking on the BART compared to those in the control group. Specifically, we hypothesised that mindfulness would help participants become more aware of their impulses and more deliberate in their decision-making, leading to fewer balloon explosions and more cautious behavior overall.
To test this theory: we recruited a total of 182 participants with an average age of 21. Participants were either in the control or experimental condition. The control group was designed to find a baseline for risk-taking levels in general. However in the experimental group, participants completed a five minute mindfulness session and then everyone completed the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART)! The BART is a well researched way of estimating a person’s gambling levels. Players are challenged to blow up a balloon as much as possible without popping it, each pump earns them a little money. To cash out their earnings for that balloon, they must choose to stop pumping it up before it bursts. If the balloon pops, they lose the money for that round. This setup mimics real-world risk-reward trade-offs and provides insight into how willing someone is to gamble for potential gain.
Weirdly enough, the results showed the exact opposite of what we expected! I won’t bother going into the statistics (mostly because I don’t want to) but those who completed the mindfulness sesh were more likely to take risks! This was totally unexpected and gives the impression that participants became less calm or risk aware aer the exercise. I made a few guesses as to why this happened: firstly, the mindfulness clip that was used was in my opinion not the best. In the background you could hear birds chirping and cars flying by. The narrator also stuttered a handful of times which in my opinion, distracted from the task at hand.
Another potential issue is that participants perhaps felt too calm or didn’t feel fully immersed in the experience. Ethics are an incredibly important part of psychological studies and we had to strike a fine balance of being honest with participants about what they were doing while still having a little mystery around our actual intentions. What is also interesting is that in a way it’s been shown that personality can have an impact on mindfulness outcomes. Individuals who are good at persevering have been shown to have better engagement with mindfulness practices: this means that it isn’t a universally helpful therapy.
In addition, informal participant feedback revealed that many focused more on the monetary reward than on the actual number of balloon pumps, which could mean they were driven by immediate outcomes rather than reflecting on the risks they were taking. This kind of goal-oriented focus might override any calming or regulatory effects of mindfulness, especially if participants were already inclined toward competitive or reward-based thinking.
Ultimately, the study highlights that mindfulness is promising in many areas but not a guaranteed solution for reducing risk-taking behaviour. The effectiveness of mindfulness appears to be influenced by a range of individual factors including personality traits like perseverance and negative urgency, as well as the quality of the intervention itself. While our results contradicted the original hypothesis, they open up valuable new questions about how and when mindfulness works best. It seems that in order to see reliable effects, future research should consider adapting mindfulness practices to better suit individual differences and ensure a more immersive, well-designed intervention. Like many psychological interventions, mindfulness isn’t one-size-fits-all.