Power of positive thinking skews mindfulness studies

Nature News & Comment

 This doesn’t necessarily suggest that none of the mindfulness treatments work, says study co-author Brett Thombs, a psychologist at McGill and at the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal. “I have no doubt that mindfulness helps a lot of people,” he says. “I’m not against mindfulness. I think that we need to have honestly and completely reported evidence to figure out for whom it works and how much.”

 The bias towards reporting positive results is pervasive across many types of mental health, psychology and medical research, says Ferguson. For example, the widely popularized theory of ego depletion — that people have limited self-control for decisions — recently failed to hold up in a large replication trial. “A lot of these things are reported to be true, they’re in a TEDx talk,” he says. “Now we're seeing, when we look at things much more closely, we’ve kind of been bullshitting people [for] a decade.”