Research has found that just 15 minutes of mindful meditation can help people make more rational decisions, suggesting a way to boost business performance by improving employee health via corporate meditation programmes.

Researchers from INSEAD – the graduate business school with campuses in Europe, Asia and the Middle East – and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, have published their findings in Psychological Science.

Meditation can weaken the tendency to think about the future or past, known as mind-wandering. Building one’s awareness of the present moment and letting go of other thoughts during meditation means the decision-maker can be more balanced in problem-solving. The study suggests that this mindful meditation can reduce the tendency to fail to admit initial decisions that lead to undesirable outcomes were wrong.

“People don’t want to feel wasteful or that their initial investment was a loss,” said lead author Andrew Hafenbrack from INSEAD. “Ironically, this kind of thinking often causes people to waste or lose more resources in an attempt to regain their initial investment or try to ‘break even’.” The researchers refer to this tendency as the ‘sunk-cost bias’ – meaning ‘throwing good money after bad’.

Co-author Zoe Kinias added: “Meditation reduced how much people focused on the past and future, and this psychological shift led to less negative emotion. The reduced negative emotion then facilitated their ability to let go of ‘sunk costs’.”

The potential for improving both business decisions by employees and overall health is recognised by co-author Sigal Barsade: “Our findings hold great promise for research on how mindfulness can influence emotions and behaviour, and how employees can use it to feel and perform better.”