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MINDFULNESS MEDITATION REDUCES ESSENTIALIST BELIEFS ABOUT RACE AND GENDER

Abstract

People intuitively adopt social essentialist beliefs and assume that social category membership are biologically determined and indicative of uniform individual features. Social essentialism often leads to negative social consequences, such as stereotypes and enhanced social boundaries. However, little research has explored possible intervention to reduce social essentialist bias. The current research aims to use mindfulness meditation, a commonly practiced strategy to enhance monitoring activities of the mind, as a potential intervention to reduce social essentialist thinking. Originated from Eastern Buddhism, mindfulness meditation encourages a neutral, non-judgmental perspective to observe and accept current cognitive and emotional states. Seventy-seven undergraduate students attending a large public university in Southeast USA completed a two-session lab experiment. In each session, they either listened to a nine-minute guided mindfulness meditation (mindfulness condition), or a nine-minute BBC podcast on neutral content (control condition), before completing two previously validated measures of social essentialism (a 9-point, 6-item Social Essentialism Scale; and a vignette-based Switched-at-Birth task). Preliminary findings showed that, as compared to those in the control condition, those who listened to mindfulness meditation were less likely to assume racial identities as biologically determined and fixed in both sessions; and less likely to assume gender identities as biologically determined and fixed in the post session. However, this effect was not observed when reasoning about political affiliation and social class. The current results suggest that mindfulness meditation can be used as an intervention tool to reduce social essentialist beliefs in some domains. Future research should continue to explore the contextual factors enhancing or limiting this effect, as well as its applications in non-laboratory settings.

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