Confirmation bias in the utilization of others' opinion strength.

Humans tend to discount information that undermines past choices and judgments. This confirmation bias has significant impact on domains ranging from politics to science and education. Little is known about the mechanisms underlying this fundamental characteristic of belief formation.

Mindfulness training modulates value signals in ventromedial prefrontal cortex through input from insular cortex.

Neuroimaging research has demonstrated that ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) encodes value signals that can be modulated by top-down cognitive input such as semantic knowledge, price incentives, and monetary favors suggesting that such biases may have an identified biological basis. It has been hypothesized that mindfulness training (MT) provides one path for gaining control over such top-down influences; yet, there have been no direct tests of this hypothesis. Here, we probe the behavioral and neural effects of MT on value signals in vmPFC in a randomized longitudinal design of 8 weeks of MT on an initially naïve subject cohort.

Monetary favors and their influence on neural responses and revealed preference.

Favors from a sender to a receiver are known to bias decisions made by the recipient, especially when the decision relates to the sender, a feature of social exchange known as reciprocity. Using an art-viewing paradigm possessing no objectively correct answer for preferring one piece of art over another, we show that sponsorship of the experiment by a company endows the logo of the company with the capacity to bias revealed preference for art displayed next to the logo. Merely offering to sponsor the experiment similarly endowed the gesturing logo of the company with the capacity to bias revealed preferences.