"I keep hearing people talk about how lime is so tasty, but why should I spend my hard-earned money on a citrus fruit until I've seen convincing evidence that it's actually tasty?"
I'm interested in how people make decisions about what to do. Especially considering how the frontiers of science are so difficult to keep track of. Like, if you were to base your diet on recent nutrition research, you'd have to spend hours every day just reviewing the literature, and you'd probably have to change your diet every week to accomodate for new findings, contradictions, etc.
To me it seems like people are most likely to just go by their own intuitive desires and preferences, using science at most to validate and confirm what they already wanted based on other factors. So, bluntly speaking, someone who is really fascinated by "spiritual" stuff will google for "meditation benefits pdf" and someone who wants to do other things with their time will look out for criticisms and "FUD."
Mostly I'd just make the point that if you try and sit quietly for ten minutes on three consecutive days, that's a negliglible time spent to try for yourself something that a lot of people say is significantly nice in some way—and that's probably a more efficient use of time than to try and look through the available scientific evidence.
