Week 1: Introduction, Research Process, and Literature Review

In the mindfulness and sunk-cost article used in the lecture, what kind of study was Study 1?

The mindfulness and sunk-cost article includes four studies. Study 1 measured the relationship between trait mindfulness (using the Mindful Attention Awareness Scale) and resistance to the sunk-cost bias (using a decision-making inventory) in 178 participants recruited via Amazon's Mechanical Turk. It did not manipulate any variables — it simply measured existing traits and looked for associations between them, controlling for age and self-esteem. That makes it a correlational study. The article's General Discussion section also explicitly states: 'In Study 1, a correlational study, we demonstrated a significant positive relationship between trait mindfulness and resistance to the sunk-cost bias.' The later studies (2a, 2b, and 3) were the laboratory experiments, where participants were randomly assigned to a mindfulness-meditation or mind-wandering condition.