Mindfulness and Implicit Political Intergroup Bias

As a conceptual replication of Tincher, Lebois, and Barsalou (2016), I investigated the effects of a brief mindfulness intervention on two measures related to intergroup bias: language abstraction and the differential attribution of uniquely-human emotions to different groups. In Experiment 1, 207 politically liberal or conservative participants were randomly assigned to a mindful attention, immersed attention, or no instruction condition. Participants were exposed to a series of visual and auditory stimuli, including several pictures of valenced behavior performed by an ingroup or an outgroup member. They were also asked to indicate which emotions are characteristic of typical ingroup and outgroup members. Experiment 2 had more participants (N = 265) and introduced several design improvements but was otherwise identical in method. In neither study was the Linguistic Intergroup Bias (LIB) effect elicited, even within control conditions (i.e., there was no LIB effect for mindful attention to attenuate). Mindful attention also did not affect the emotion-attribution measure of infrahumanization, which occurred across all conditions in both experiments. However, an unanticipated effect was replicated in both experiments: liberals infrahumanized conservatives, but conservatives’ infrahumanization of liberals was much weaker and not statistically significant. Discussion focuses on the challenges and importance of replication in social psychology, the nature and challenge of brief mindfulness manipulations, and the implications of infrahumanizing political rivals, particularly among liberals in today’s combative political climate