On Whether to Meditate Before a Negotiation: Mindfulness Slightly Impairs Value Claiming in Negotiation

What little prior empirical research that investigated the effects of mindfulness meditation on negotiation performance was conducted in Singapore and the UK and finds benefits. This research reports a mini meta-analysis of ten studies (N > 1100) we conducted in the US on the effect of a brief mindfulness meditation induction on negotiation outcomes and finds a small detriment in terms of value claimed. We had initially hypothesized that mindfulness meditation would help individuals obtain better objective outcomes by claiming more value for themselves due to reduced emotional interference and enhanced flexibility of thought. However, the first study we ran found a moderately strong result in the opposite direction – participants who had just meditated obtained worse objective outcomes by claiming less value than participants in the control condition who had not meditated. In terms of subjective negotiation outcomes, participants in the mindfulness condition reported marginally less satisfaction with the instrumental outcome compared to participants in the control condition. Then we ran nine more experiments and never obtained a significant effect of mindfulness on objective outcomes again. The meta-analysis of the total effect on value claiming across these ten studies was significant (p = .020), negative, and very small (aggregated d = -0.138, 95% confidence interval [-.256, -.021]). We also ran a second meta-analysis on value creation on the appropriate subset of participants and did not find a significant total effect in either direction (p = .609, aggregated d = -.076, 95% confidence interval [-.367, .215]). We discuss implications for theory and practice.