Short-Term Meditation Promotes Prosocial Investments During Financial Crises : A Laboratory Experiment

We investigate the impact of short-term meditation on prosocial investment before and during a financial crisis in a lab-experiment involving 188 student subjects: 97 of them meditated for five days in a row, and 91 of them listened to a simple narrative before engaging in an economic experiment. We report two main results. First, participants invest more in the less profitable prosocial (green) asset than in the more profitable antisocial (brown) asset, whether in quiet times or in downturn. Second, in times of crisis, meditators divest less from prosocial assets than non-meditators. Our findings suggest that meditation could mitigate the severity of market crashes and downturns and favor socially responsible investments even if these are less profitable. We contribute to the mindfulness literature by taking a first step on the effect of meditation on prosocial investments in times of crisis