Jason Meno
speaker
219 appearances
2 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2024
last heard Oct 2024
Jason Meno’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
Right.
Yeah. And I did run some analysis that I'll talk about here in a bit of what the difference was between these two groups, because we did gather even the people who did drop out. They did provide some initial information that that's quite useful. So so at the very start of this, when you're when you're doing a meditation experiment, one of your biggest questions is the placebo effect.
Like, is meditation a placebo? Is it just essentially you think meditation is going to help you? Therefore, it does. And another way to think about it is you could think of it as the expectation effect. What expectations do you have about meditation and what do you think is going to happen to you while doing this?
Because not only can you have the placebo effect, but in meditation, there's also a problem with the nocebo effect where you actually think meditation might hurt you or give you a panic attack or something bad might happen to you if you meditate. And that can result in some unpleasant side effects as well. So here's what I did at the start.
I created a little introductory lesson where I just explained what this was going to do, that they were going to sit down for an hour and going to try these five different meditations. And the first set of questions I asked them were really just, I wanted to understand how familiar they were with David, how familiar they were with meditation, and what they expected to happen in this.
So I'll read off some numbers here so you can get an idea of what people thought about this process. So for each one of these questions, I'll tell you what the finishers, the people who actually finished the meditations, what they thought and what the people who didn't finish thought.
So both groups, finishers and non-finishers, their familiarity with David, I just ask them, like, how familiar are you with Dr. David Burns and his work? From zero to 100, all of these questions I ask are going to be from zero, not at all, to 100, like 100%. So with how familiar are you with David, the average score was 80 for both groups. So very, very familiar, very much so.
And then I asked, how familiar are you with meditation and mindfulness? And that number for both groups was about the same, 69. So, you know, quite a bit, quite, quite familiar, but not super duper familiar. Yeah. The next question I asked was, do you think how much do you believe that meditation will make you feel better? So this is the expectation effect that we're asking here.
One of the expectation effects. Do you think meditation will make you feel better? How much do you believe that it will? The people who finished, they started off believing at 62 percent. So 60 percent, 62 percent, they thought it was going to make them feel better. And the people who didn't finish was 58%.
So definitely the people who didn't finish, they did not think that meditation was going to make them feel as good. But both groups were over 50%. They still believed that it was going to have some effect.
I didn't run any... I haven't run that test yet. When I look at the distribution of the data, they look like different distributions. Like when I run a box plot and histogram, started to get nerdy about it. But yeah, they do look like different distributions, but their averages are very close and their medians are very close.
Yeah, you can think of it as very different clusters. The people who finished the meditations, they're pretty spread out all across the board. So there were people who didn't think the meditation was going to have much of any effect. There were people who thought that, yeah, it definitely was going to have an effect and everywhere in between.
But the people who didn't finish, they definitely seem to be more clustered into the side of thinking that it really won't have much of an effect or it won't be that helpful. So a lot of these questions, I'm also asking very similar repeatable questions as well to increase the reliance of these metrics.
Like basically for the question of will it make you feel better and how much do you believe that it will be rewarding? They're very, very similar questions. And in both of these cases... How much do they believe it will be rewarding? About 62% for the finishers and 55% for people who didn't finish.
Yeah, that's right. Very, very similar. And now we get into the neutral effect of the question now is how much do you believe that meditation will have little effect at all? And with this one, this is a negative question. I would say this is a neutral question. The negative question, which I also asked, which is how much do you believe meditation will make you feel worse?
That's right. Yeah. The question was, how much do you believe meditation will have little effect? Little effect, kind of not very effective. Not very effective, right. Oh, okay. And the finishers, their belief was 27%. So not very many people. So there was a little bit of signal there that there was some skepticism that it would have little effect, but it's small. Yeah.
And the non-finishers was 35. So almost eight points higher. So definitely people who did not finish didn't think it would have an effect either. The next question was meditation. How much do you believe meditation will be a complete waste of time?
Yep. And the finishers said 17%. So 17 out of 100 is what their average score was. And the non-finishers was 26 out of 100, so nine points higher. Yeah, so the people who did not finish it, well, they started off believing. Like, they didn't even meditate yet, but they believed that it would be a waste of time. And...
And in context, like one of the earlier questions we asked was, how familiar are you with meditation? And both groups were moderately familiar, you know, around, I think it was in the 60s. So it's possible these groups of people, they've meditated before. And if they had a good time in the past, they might think that they'll have a good time now.
If they had a bad time in the past, they might think they have a bad time again. So I imagine that their past experiences are probably coloring these expectations they're having. And then the next two questions were, how much do you believe that meditation will make you feel worse? And those numbers for finishers was 8, 8%, 8 out of 100. And non-finishers was 13.
Showing 21–40 of 219 · page 2 of 11
← Previous
Next →