New research has discovered that an ancient Buddhist practice can reduce unconscious racial biases in white college students.
The study by Adam Lueke and Bryan Gibson, published in the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, found that brief training in mindfulness meditation reduced implicit race and age bias.
Mindfulness meditation originated in the East Asian Buddhist tradition, but has recently become a hot topic among Western scientists.
“Mindfulness meditation focuses the individual on the present and encourages practitioners to view thoughts and feelings nonjudgmentally as mental events, rather than as part of the self,” Lueke and Gibson explained. “This allows the individual to understand and reflect on these events as transient moments that are separate from the self, which inhibits the natural tendency toward reaction and automatic evaluation.”
Clinical psychologist Robert Marx discusses the meaning of mindfulness:
In their study, 72 white students from a Midwestern university listened to either a 10-minute mindfulness recording or a control recording that discussed natural history, then completed an implicit association test from the Project Implicit website.
Implicit association tests are designed to reveal unconscious biases. The test used in the present study required participants to rapidly categorize white and black faces as well as young and old faces that flashed on a computer screen. The researchers measured how long it took the participants to categorize the faces as good or bad.
“Research has shown that white participants who take the IAT tend to have stronger associations between White and good than between black and good. This is indicated by quicker response times for words that represent good things when paired with white faces than with black faces, and for quicker response times for words that represent bad things when paired with black faces than with white faces,” the researchers explained.
Similar findings have been reported for young people, who tend to be quicker to categorize young faces as good.
The researchers found that the participants who listened to the mindfulness recording showed less implicit bias against blacks and old people. The results show that “mindfulness reduced reliance on automatic associations,” the researchers said.
Lueke and Gibson said future research would need to determine how long this effect lasts — they suspect the effect wears off if mindfulness is not practiced regularly — and whether it also applies to sexual orientation and other social biases.
“While it is important to continue to teach tolerance and acceptance of other people, automatic processes still exert tremendous influence in the evaluation and treatment of others. Understanding how mindfulness meditation may reduce these automatic processes would be an important step toward reducing prejudice and discrimination,” Lueke and Gibson wrote.
“The mindfulness tradition is one in which everyone and everything are interconnected. Intergroup bias is in direct opposition to this, and the automatic component of this bias leads to behaviors that build boundaries that keep us distant and wary of others. If the practice of mindfulness can help us overcome these automatic biases, then the words ‘We are here to awaken from the illusion of our separateness’ (Thich Nhat Hanh, 2008) can become a reality.”