Sunday, December 07, 2014

Mindfulness Short-Circuits Reflexive Racial Bias

I'm wondering why the article doesn't tell us what words come to African-American people's minds when they see pictures of people of various races.

http://www.psmag.com/navigation/health-and-behavior/meditation-mindfulness-short-circuits-reflexive-racial-bias-95713/

By Tom Jacobs • December 02, 2014

Racial bias has declined drastically in the United States over the past few decades. And yet, recent reaction to the tragic events in Ferguson, Missouri, suggests race continues to color our opinions, with both blacks and whites holding firm assumptions that their counterparts completely reject.

It’s something of a conundrum, until you consider implicit beliefs—the automatic thoughts and feelings that arise when one looks at an image of someone of another race. While these often operate below our level of consciousness, they shape our views of society and opinions on such policy issues as affirmative action, voter ID laws, and whether the justice system is genuinely just.

Fortunately, new research has documented a surprisingly simple way to short-circuit these knee-jerk negative associations. The key, according to Central Michigan University psychologists Adam Lueke and Bryan Gibson, is mindfulness.

In the journal Social Psychological and Personality Science, they report that a 10-minute introduction to mindfulness meditation led to “a decrease in implicit age and race bias.” Even when it comes to the emotionally charged issue of race, it seems that slowing down long enough to notice our thoughts and feelings disrupts our tendency to unthinkingly accept reflexively triggered biases.

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