Can Mindfulness promote Social Change?

Mindfulness activities have been shown to reduce stress, anxiety, and depression, but new research indicates that mindfulness practices can also reduce biases by exploring our assumptions, becoming open to new ideas, and reducing judgmental thinking. Also, gratitude practices and loving-kindness meditations build empathy and connectedness that reduces biases. Thus, mindfulness practices can improve relationships between groups that often hold stereotypical views of each other.

Meditation and other mindfulness practices help people be less judgmental of others by reducing three types of biases. The first type of bias, correspondence bias, includes thoughts about a person’s character traits that ignores external factors. For example, a person may attribute laziness to a person without a job instead of thinking about the economy and high unemployment rates for the area. Correspondence bias is often associated with stereotypes for specific groups of people and can make it difficult to understand or empathize with an individual’s situation. Mindfulness practices, by definition, focus on being present in the moment and viewing experiences from a framework of non-judgment. Thus, increasing use of mindfulness and meditation practices makes us less likely to judge people using correspondence bias and instead seeing them as individuals that may be in situations they may not have power to change.

Another way mindfulness practices can promote social relationships is by reducing our negativity bias toward individuals from other social groups. Negativity bias is the tendency for people to pay attention to, remember, and avoid repeating negative experiences. This is why people often remember negative social interactions more than joyful social experiences. Since being rejected is a strong negative experience, people are less likely to want to go into situations where rejection is high (like meeting new people especially if they are outside your normal social group). When people participate in mindfulness exercises, negativity bias is reduced, and greater awareness is given to positive information thereby reducing anxiety associated with meeting new people and many other social interactions that negativity bias may influence. Mindfulness practices make us less reactive to negative events which in social situations can reduce fear of rejection and allow for more meaningful connections to occur and more open communication to develop between different social groups.

The third type of bias that mindfulness can reduce is self-positivity bias. As the name suggests, this type of bias occurs when individuals see themselves (and those like them) more positively than others, especially those outside their social group. People with a strong self-positivity bias will go out of their way to put others down to reaffirm their views about themselves. Mindfulness counters self-positivity bias by creating a strong sense of self (though increased self-awareness and self-efficiency) that results in more compassion and empathy for people that are different from us.

Together mindfulness practices improve social interactions between different groups by reducing these three types of bias which reduces intergroup bias, the preference for favoring an ingroup (people like you) over an outgroup (people from different backgrounds or social groups), which promotes and improves diverse relationships. If more people practice meditation and mindfulness strategies, then our relationships and interactions with other social groups may strengthen and allow our communities to heal.