Does focused attention meditation improve probability weighting bias? The role of emotional trade-off difficulty and compensatory decision making

Focused attention (FA) meditation has been proposed to enhance decision quality by mitigating cognitive biases. However, its influence on probability weighting bias (PWB), the tendency to misperceive objective probabilities, remains unexplored. Furthermore, emotional trade-off difficulty (ETOD), defined as the affective strain of making complex trade offs, may influence this relationship. The present study explores the interplay between FA meditation, ETOD, and PWB. Specifically, we examined whether ETOD’s effect on PWB is mediated by compensatory decision strategies (systematic trade-off evaluation versus reliance on heuristics), and whether a brief FA induction moderates this process. A 2 × 2 between-subjects experiment was conducted with 138 participants randomly assigned to either a brief focused attention or a mind-wandering control condition. Participants completed a decision-making task to induce either high or low levels of ETOD. PWB was assessed through a series of risky-choice scenarios, while gaze-time tracking measured the extent of compensatory information processing, proposed as a mediating variable. Under high ETOD, participants who underwent FA induction demonstrated significantly greater PWB compared to those in the control group, suggesting that FA meditation exacerbated decision bias under emotional strain. In contrast, under low ETOD, FA meditation reduced PWB. Moderated mediation analysis revealed that ETOD influenced PWB through its impact on compensatory decision strategies, with this pathway being moderated by FA induction. Our results demonstrate that FA meditation effectively mitigates PWB under low ETOD conditions but does not yield the same benefit under high ETOD. Consequently, we conclude that the utility of FA meditation is strictly context-dependent.