Mindfulness and Implicit Political Intergroup Bias

As a conceptual replication of Tincher, Lebois, and Barsalou (2016), I investigated the effects of a brief mindfulness intervention on two measures related to intergroup bias: language abstraction and the differential attribution of uniquely-human emotions to different groups. In Experiment 1, 207 politically liberal or conservative participants were randomly assigned to a mindful attention, immersed attention, or no instruction condition. Participants were exposed to a series of visual and auditory stimuli, including several pictures of valenced behavior performed by an ingroup or an outgroup member. They were also asked to indicate which emotions are characteristic of typical ingroup and outgroup members. Experiment 2 had more participants (N = 265) and introduced several design improvements but was otherwise identical in method. In neither study was the Linguistic Intergroup Bias (LIB) effect elicited, even within control conditions (i.e., there was no LIB effect for mindful attention to attenuate). Mindful attention also did not affect the emotion-attribution measure of infrahumanization, which occurred across all conditions in both experiments. However, an unanticipated effect was replicated in both experiments: liberals infrahumanized conservatives, but conservatives’ infrahumanization of liberals was much weaker and not statistically significant. Discussion focuses on the challenges and importance of replication in social psychology, the nature and challenge of brief mindfulness manipulations, and the implications of infrahumanizing political rivals, particularly among liberals in today’s combative political climate. MINDFULNESS AND POLITICAL INTERGROUP BIAS 1 Mindfulness and Implicit Political Intergroup Bias The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence. This assertion, expressed in various ways by the philosopher and spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti (e.g., Krishnamurti, 1991, p. 152,158, 264-265), captures the distinctive character of mindfulness, a term that has become increasingly familiar in western culture and academic scholarship. Krishamurti’s description implies a model of intelligence that is noteworthy because of what it omits—e.g., judgment, knowledge-acquisition, reasoning, goal-directed behavior, and social interaction—features historically emphasized in many Western lay and academic conceptions of intelligence (Cianciolo & Sternberg, 2008; Sternberg, 2000a). In placing primacy on the act of dispassionate observation, teachers such as Krishnamurti suggest a kind of metaknowledge, derived from direct experience and spontaneous insight, and in which the contents of the mind—thoughts, emotions, beliefs, goals, memories—are mere objects of present-moment attention. From this perspective, the mind, and even the self, is essentially no different from, say, the color of the sunset or the sound of rain; they are all arising and passing phenomena, devoid of essential or permanent ontological status. Practitioners of meditation often describe the practice as leading to a state of “awakening,” compared to the relative “delusion” of habitual concepts and categorization. The key observational technique from meditative practice, mindfulness, has consequently been a subject of considerable interest among philosophers and social scientists. While the study of mindfulness has been a common feature of the clinical psychology and medical literature for the past three decades, it has received comparatively less attention among sociologists and social psychologists (Karremans & Papies, 2017; Lee, 2015). For example, as of this writing, a search for the term “mindfulness” in article titles and abstracts in the sociology database SocINDEX results in 840 entries, compared to 9,632 entries in the MINDFULNESS AND POLITICAL INTERGROUP BIAS 2 PsychINFO psychology database. Additionally, searches conducted via the publishers’ websites for the term “mindfulness” in the title or abstracts of articles within Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, The Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, and Personality and Social Psychology Review—some of social psychology’s premiere research journals—results in only 51 articles. One consequence of the lack of social-psychological attention to mindfulness is that the bulk of empirical work has focused on either relatively asocial and individual-level outcomes (e.g., anxiety, stress, depression, coping, healthy behaviors, self-esteem) or to dyadic interpersonal processes and, to a lesser extent, organizational/workplace performance (Barnes, Brown, Krusemark, Campbell, & Rogge, 2007; Creswell, 2017; Good et al., 2016; Goyal et al., 2014; Kabat‐Zinn, 2003; Laurent, Hertz, Nelson, & Laurent, 2016; Sedlmeier et al., 2012). While these types of psychological and group outcomes are undoubtedly important, a disproportionate focus on them can undergird a type of common critique made against mindfulness practices like meditation, especially in contexts in which it is secularized or “corporatized” in mainstream culture: that inner-directed transformative work may ultimately distract attention away from efforts to achieve structural change and social justice (Comstock, 2015; Lee, 2015; Moore, 2016; Rowe, 2016). Stated another way, meditation might make you more productive and content, but it is useless for resolving or fundamentally transforming intergroup conflict and oppression. If this argument is true, then Krishamurti’s notion of intelligence holds little relevance for addressing phenomena such as prejudice or political intolerance. Given its focus on intraindividual processes in interpersonal and intergroup contexts, social psychology may be a more useful approach than clinical psychology or medicine for testing whether mindfulness can help to quell intergroup conflict and/or intergroup oppression. However, the concept of mindfulness is only just now MINDFULNESS AND POLITICAL INTERGROUP BIAS 3 beginning to be integrated into the existing theoretical frameworks of social psychology, and there exists very little independent social psychological theorizing that explicates the various mechanisms of mindfulness or how they relate to social processes (Karremans & Papies, 2017). (There are some notable exceptions, such the work of Ellen Langer and colleagues, and those are briefly discussed in the next section.) The aim of the present research was to replicate and extend the findings of an experiment by Tincher, Lebois, and Barsalou (2016), which demonstrated a statistically significant reduction in the Linguistic Intergroup Bias (LIB) effect after a brief laboratory mindfulness intervention. I chose a conceptual replication attempt rather than a newly-formulated research question for two reasons. First, Tincher et al.’s experiment represents a growing, but nascent, focus area within social psychology. In such initial stages of research, it is often useful to seek corroborating evidence of a basic finding rather than contribute to a profusion of single studies that all have different methods and outcome measures. Second, the present research was inspired in part by continuing disquietude among social psychologists regarding low statistical power, publication bias, and failed replications across many studies and domains (e.g., Earp & Trafimow, 2015; Maxwell, 2004; Open Science Collaboration, 2015; Simmons, Nelson, & Simonsohn, 2011). By attempting an independent replication of Tincher et al.’s experiment, I was following recent prescriptions for more direct and conceptual replication within social psychology (Earp & Trafimow, 2015) while also attempting to connect their findings to a broader ecological context, namely that of contentious political partisanship. In the sections that follow, I briefly review research on the construct of mindfulness, with special attention to how it has been applied to topics such as social cognition, intergroup bias, and intergroup relations. I then describe Tincher et al.’s (2016) experiment in more detail and MINDFULNESS AND POLITICAL INTERGROUP BIAS 4 provide a brief review of the LIB effect. Finally, I provide an overview of the present research, highlighting my methodological extensions relative to the original Tincher et al. experiment. Mindfulness: A Social Psychological Review A common definition of mindfulness is that it represents a state of paying conscious attention to present-moment experiences with a curious and non-judgmental attitude (KabatZinn, 1990; Karremans & Papies, 2017). While it has roots in religious contemplative practices, particularly those of Buddhism and Hinduism, Kabat-Zinn (1990) was the first to offer an operational definition that was stripped of its religious metaphysical content and thus more conducive to psychological research. Others then began to refine and formalize the concept. Bishop et al. (2004), for example, suggested that mindfulness is distinct from other kinds of selffocused attention such as rumination or preoccupation. He presented a two-component model to describe the distinct features of a mindful approach to phenomena: (a) focusing attention on present-moment experiences, including bodily sensations, thoughts, and emotional states; and (b) approaching these experiences with a nonjudgmental attitude, irrespective of their valence. The second of these components is thought to be especially important, since it can often lead to the insight that all perceptual phenomena are transient experiences, having no fixed, unchanging, or inherent “essence,” but rather representing slices of a continual ebb and flow of causes and effects. This insight, in turn, can lead to an attentional perspective shift, most commonly referred to as “decentering. ” To decenter means to stand outside of one’s own experience perceptually, taking the perspective of a dispassionate observer. Instead of unconsciously identifying with a thought or emotion,