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Does collective meditation foster trust and trustworthiness in an investment game?

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Abstract

This research aims to determine whether people exposed to short-term collective meditation display more self-interest or more pro-social behavior in an investment game. We compare the trust and trustworthiness of two groups. Only one group was previously exposed to meditation. We find that this group exhibits more trust and pro-social behavior on average than the other group. However, these effects are temporary.

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Notes

  1. Indeed, it is worth noting that the term “yoga” encompasses a wide constellation of practices, which may vary. In particular, some of them are closer to gymnastics than meditation. Our focus in this paper is on meditation.

  2. See, among others, Linden (1973), Davidson and Goleman (1977), Kubose (1976), Sabel (1980), Valentine and Sweet (1999), Ott (2003), Wolsko et al. (2004), Tang et al. (2007, 2009), Greenberg et al. (2012), and Goyal et al. (2014). Psychological and clinical effects of meditation, explicitly including yoga, are surveyed by Cahn and Polich (2006) and Thomas and Cohen (2014).

  3. See also Farb et al. (2007) and Ding et al. (2014).

  4. Robustness was tested in a pilot experiment conducted at the University of Teramo, where 130 subjects were involved (27 pairs in meditation and 38 in the control group). In this case, we used a single round and no pre-play activities for controls. Results were almost the same.

  5. We consider trust (and trustworthiness) in accordance with Berg et al. (1995). Further treatments (appropriate dictator games) should be introduced to disentangle conditional and unconditional motivations (see Cox 2004; Di Bartolomeo and Papa 2016).

  6. We used the CNREG Stata module to estimate our Tobit model. We also test the results’ robustness for multiplicative heteroscedasticity by using the TOBITHETM model.

  7. Lists were compiled in advance using University mailing lists and advertisements placed on the University’s notice boards.

  8. Ex post facto questionnaires show us that very few subjects had experienced meditation before the experiment was carried out.

  9. In order to perform pre-play activities without pressure or stress, computer workstations were placed in a 350-square-meter room.

  10. A possible alternative for the control group is to consider physical activities. Evidence demonstrates that cognitive performance after the yoga exercises is superior to that obtained after physical activities, such as aerobics (Gothe et al. 2013). Therefore, we prefer to focus on alternative tasks that do not involve physical efforts (as in the case of our meditation exercises). We leave the issue of other possible effects to future investigations.

  11. Our exercises focused on mental concentration and relaxation, not on physical activities. A technical Supplementary material appendix available upon request provides full details of the exercises.

  12. We use a double-blind procedure. Using their codes, participants were paid by an administrative office located in a separate building (the central administration of the university), and a payment summary from the examiners by e-mail. Participants were aware that officers were unaware of the details and the reasons for the payments or anything concerning the experiment.

  13. Results on return ratios are mixed, as supported by Glaeser et al. (2000), Capra et al. (2008), Cardenas and Carpenter (2008), Johnson and Mislin (2011). In Cox (2004), the ratio is below one.

  14. Results are available upon request.

  15. Results are available upon request. We also compare the outcomes from generalized least squares (GLS) with individual random effects, which are not able to capture the bias, to those of generalized linear latent and mixed models (GLLAMM). We obtain the same results. Note that, unfortunately, a GLLAMM model has not been developed for the Tobit model.

  16. See, for example, Akerlof and Kranton (2000), Bacharach (1999, 2006) and references therein.

  17. See Kosfeld et al. (2005), Zak et al. (2005, 2007), Baumgartner et al. (2008), Delgado (2008), Zak (2008), Mikolajczak et al. (2010a, b), and Jayaram et al. (2013), among others.

  18. Note that we did not run blood tests; thus, our interpretation is based on the correlation between meditation and oxytocin provided by Jayaram et al. (2013).

  19. See, for example, Hoge et al. (2014), Bartz et al. (2011), Uhl-Bronner et al. (2005), Kemp and Guastella (2011) and Fischer-Shofty et al. (2012).

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Acknowledgments

The authors are grateful to two anonymous referees, Saverio Bellomo, Jeffrey Carpenter, Giuseppe Ciccarone, Gary Charness, Parisio Di Giovanni, Lawrence F. Katz, Ersilia Incelli, Somdeb Lahiri, Luca Stanca, and the participants of the seminars at the Universities of Teramo and Milan (Bicocca) for their useful comments and discussions on previous drafts. They also thank Fabio Bonomo (who played Tibetan singing bowls during the experiment), Simona Sciamanna (the yoga master) and Federica Del Fiume for assistance during the experiment.

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Correspondence to Stefano Papa.

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Di Bartolomeo, G., Papa, S. Does collective meditation foster trust and trustworthiness in an investment game?. Int Rev Econ 63, 379–392 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12232-016-0259-y

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