Short mindfulness task reduces bias in person judgements.

What is it about?

A short (5-minute) mindfulness exercise was found to reduce errors in judgements of others behaviour. The correspondence bias is a type of cognitive short-cut that leads to people assuming that a person's behaviour is attributed to their attitudes or internal traits, rather than to the situation or environment, even when they are explicitly told that an element of the environment would explain their behaviour. This paper found that making this error in attribution was reduced in people who completed a short mindful breathing exercise before reading the information about the persons behaviour.

Featured Image

Why is it important?

This is important as it suggests that mindfulness may have some effect on peoples ability to accurately use all of the available information before making an evaluation of another person. This could have implications for hiring decisions in the workplace, how well different groups communicate and interact, and potentially in reducing discrimination of certain people or groups. This paper provides an interesting perspective on this phenomenon because it directly compares the effects to an attention to detail task (Study 3), which suggests that mindfulness does not just make people more aware of the explicit instructions about the environmental explanation for behaviour. This paper suggests that mindfulness has a qualitatively different effect- perhaps having more of an individual or personal effect rather than an external or cognitive one.

Perspectives