Dispositional Mindfulness and Bias in Self-theories (original) (raw)

Dispositional Mindfulness and Bias in Self-theories

Adam Hanley ⋅\cdot Eric Garland ⋅\cdot Angela Canto ⋅\cdot Alia Warner ⋅\cdot Robert Hanley ⋅\cdot Vincent Dehili ⋅\cdot Andrew Proctor

© Springer Science+Business Media New York 2013

Abstract

Mindfulness is theorized to encourage a dispositional quality of nonjudgmental awareness that is incongruent with emotional and cognitive bias. Recent empirical investigations offer evidence supporting the putative negative association between dispositional mindfulness and bias. The present study aimed to test the hypothesized negative relationship between dispositional mindfulness and extreme or biased selftheories with respect to implicit beliefs about the variability of personality and intelligence. One hundred sixty-three young adults completed a measure of dispositional mindfulness followed by a self-theories implicit association test. Results indicate that respondents with less biased self-theories reported higher levels of dispositional mindfulness relative to respondents with more biased beliefs about the variability of intelligence and personality. These findings suggest that mindful individuals may adopt less biased characterizations of the self and maintain self-concepts that are less influenced by past associations or preconceived notions.

Keywords Mindfulness ⋅\cdot Bias ⋅\cdot Self-theories ⋅\cdot Implicit beliefs ⋅\cdot Intelligence ⋅\cdot Personality

Introduction

With roots in the Mahayana Middle Way, both contemplative theory and empirical evidence suggest that mindfulness is

[1]associated with reduced emotional and cognitive bias (Brown et al. 2007; Garland et al. 2011; Garland and Howard 2013; Kiken and Schook 2011; Vago and Silbersweig 2012). Generally understood as the propensity to exhibit nonjudgmental awareness of cognitive, emotional, and sensoryperceptual experience, dispositional mindfulness encourages an active engagement with the present (Vago and Silbersweig 2012). As such, dispositional mindfulness is theorized to be linked with more veridical appraisals of ongoing experiences and a reduced tendency to evaluate the present moment by previously held expectations and beliefs. With research indicating that dispositional mindfulness can be developed through sustained contemplative practices (Carmody and Baer 2008), mindful attunement with the present moment may gently guide subjective experience away from absolute thinking and extreme beliefs.

Beliefs, biases, and mindsets are habitual patterns of thought that influence how individuals perceive and relate to the world (Dweck 2000; Vago and Silbersweig 2012). Some of the most central evaluative beliefs and biases are those held about the self. Theories of self are likely ubiquitous, but one of the most rigorously developed comes from the Mahayana school of Buddhism. Buddhist contemplatives have long labored to develop methods of introspection and observation that transcend evaluative cognition (e.g., beliefs and biases) to facilitate direct insight into the nature of the self. Fundamental to these contemplative methods and insights is an apparent contradiction: (a) the self is commonly held to be the fixed and unchanging observer of experience, yet (b) the self as manifest to contemplative observation is impermanent and exists in flux with its context. The Mahayana sage Nagarjuna used the concept of sunyata, or emptiness of intrinsic and permanent self-nature, to challenge this contradiction. Sunyata implies that all experienced phenomena (including the self) are devoid of a permanent and inherently existing substance, yet, nonetheless phenomena are experienced and, therefore, not nonexistent. Thus, Nagarjuna warned that sunyata should not supplant the self as an absolute belief, and instead, he presented the idea of the sunyata of sunyata,

1. A. Hanley (⊠)⋅(\boxtimes) \cdot A. Canto ⋅\cdot A. Warner ⋅\cdot V. Dehili
   Educational Psychology and Learning Systems, Florida State University, 3210 Stone Building, Tallahassee, FL 32306-4459, USA
   e-mail: awh10d@my.fsu.edu
   E. Garland
   Huntsman Cancer Institute, University of Utah, Salt Lake City, UT, USA
   R. Hanley
   Austin, Texas
   A. Proctor
   Alpine, Utah ↩︎

arguing that all extreme forms of thinking (i.e., the self as fixed versus the absence of the permanent self) are untenable and the only logical path lies in the middle (McFarlane 1995). Similar lines of thought emphasizing the dangers of extremity and benefits of balance emerged across times and cultures, from Aristotle (Aristotle and Woods 2005), Taoist texts (Cleary 1991; Tse 2008), and more recent Catholic monastics (Merton 1955). From this perspective, balance is encouraged both in our beliefs about the world and, more fundamentally, in our self-theories-a balance largely incompatible with extreme beliefs and biases.

Western philosophies tend to view the self as either fixed or variable, often finding the both/and view proposed by Nagarjuna difficult to reconcile. Two of the most fundamental aspects of self, personality and intelligence, are commonly held by Westerners to be either static or dynamic, but typically not both. Personality is largely conceptualized as a fixed and unchanging trait (American Psychiatric Association 2000) solidifying in late adolescence and early adulthood (Hopwood et al. 2011). Yet epigenetics, injury, biochemical changes, and social context can dramatically alter personality characteristics and recent explorations of personality across the life-span suggest considerable change in the expression of personality characteristics over time (Barrash et al. 2011; Roberts et al. 2006). As to intelligence, schools are charged with intellectual growth and development based on the malleability (or at least developmental nature) of the intellect. Nevertheless, academic settings continue to heavily rely on more static concepts, such as IQ, though recently IQ has been shown to be modifiable through education (Brinch and Galloway 2012). Within this larger social context, psychological self-theories have been developed, with Dweck (2000) specifically exploring implicit beliefs about the variability of both intelligence and personality.

Dweck’s (2000) Implicit Theories model contends that individuals differ in their implicitly held conceptualizations of personality and intelligence. Some individuals endorse an entity mindset, which reflects the belief that intelligence and personality are unchangeable and fixed, while others may endorse an incremental mindset, perceiving these constructs as malleable (Dweck 2000). Individuals who operate from such implicit beliefs may tend to relate to the self or social situations in habitual or automatic ways, dictated by previously established expectations. In contrast, dispositionally mindful individuals operate through a mindset characterized by nonjudgment and open acceptance of experience (KabatZinn 1990). Such individuals may exhibit a “beginner’s mind,” which is “empty, free of the habits of the expert, ready to accept, to doubt, and open to all the possibilities” (Suzuki 1970, p. 16). Despite the fundamental tenet that mindfulness reduces automatic responding and preliminary findings supporting the role of mindfulness in reducing stereotypes (Djikic et al. 2008) as well as biases (Kiken and Shook
2011), little is known about how dispositional mindfulness is associated with implicitly held beliefs regarding self-theories.

The aim of the present study was to examine the association between dispositional mindfulness and implicit beliefs about the variability of personality and intelligence. Implicit self-beliefs were assessed with an Implicit Association Test, a well-studied, empirically validated means of evaluating unconscious beliefs that has previously been employed in research on implicit thoughts and emotions about race, gender, mental illness, and political preference (Greenwald et al. 2009). Building from Dweck’s (2000) work on self-theories and the Mahayana emphasis on the Middle Way, we expected individuals would fall into one of the following three implicit self-belief categories: those who were biased towards the variability of intelligence (intelligence variable group), those who were biased towards the variability of personality (personality variable group), and a more neutral group evidencing little or no implicit bias towards intelligence or personality (unbiased group). Our primary study hypothesis was that the unbiased group would exhibit significantly higher dispositional mindfulness than the variable intelligence or variable personality groups.

Method

Participants

Participants were 163 undergraduate students registered for a class in the department of education at a large southeastern university. The department is 68%68 \% female with a mean age of 26.7. A brief description of this study was posted online for recruitment purposes and participating students received .5 h , of a required 2 research participation hours per semester. Those students not choosing to participate in research were offered the option of completing other assignments of comparable length to fulfill their 2-h research requirement. The university’s institutional review board approved the study.

Procedures

All measures were administered online through Qualtrics surveying software. Interested participants were e-mailed the study link after contacting the primary researcher through the college of education’s subject pool. Instructions and pertinent study information were provided via an online fact sheet. Following consent, participants completed a measure of mindfulness (Baer et al. 2008) and then an implicit association task (IAT), developed for this study that measured participants’ implicit beliefs about the variability of intelligence and personality. The survey took an average of 24 min to complete

with a 68%68 \% completion rate. Of the 261 students that began the survey, 170 completed it. Of the 170 successfully completing the survey, seven students responses were discarded due to timing irregularities (e.g., taking too long ( >10 s>10 \mathrm{~s} ), or responding too quickly ( <.30 s<.30 \mathrm{~s} ) on the IAT) as suggested by Greenwald et al. 2009.

Measures

Trait mindfulness was measured with the 39-item Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ; Baer et al. 2008), scored on a five-point Likert scale ( 1=1= rarely true, 5=5= very often true )) assessing five, distinct facets of mindfulness: nonreactivity, nonjudgment, observing, describing emotions, and acting with awareness. This measure produces a total mindfulness score as well as a subscale score for each of the five facets. With evidence suggesting that order effects are largely absent in studies using IATs (Nosek et al. 2005), we chose to administer the FFMQ along with the demographic items as it functioned as a grouping variable in this study. By administering the FFMQ first, we controlled for the possibility that the IAT would influence mindfulness self-reports. The influence of the completing the FFMQ on IAT scores was a lesser concern as the IAT is thought to address implicit or automatic associations less susceptible to effortful self-presentation (Greenwald et al. 2009).

IAT are empirically validated methods of assessing unconscious beliefs that have employed in the exploration of implicit thoughts and emotions about race, mental illness, disability, and age (Greenwald et al. 2009). In this study, a SelfTheories IAT was used to assess participants’ implicit beliefs about the variability of intelligence and personality. The IAT is a computer-based assessment in which participants are asked to quickly group sets of stimuli words into categories. The stimuli words are presented one at a time, centered on the computer screen, and participants are instructed to use the computer’s keyboard to quickly and accurately group the stimuli words into one of two categories presented on either side of the computer screen (Fig. 1). The full instructions are provided in the Appendix.

For this study, the “Q” key was pressed to group the stimuli word with the category on the left side of the screen, while the “P” key was pressed to group the stimuli word in the category presented on the right side of the screen. An inaccurate grouping led to an error message. For the Self-Theories IAT, there were four distinct categories: intelligence, personality, variable, and stable (Table 1).

There are seven distinct tasks in an IAT. The first two tasks are unscored and used for practice to ensure that participants know which stimuli words should be grouped with which categories. In the first task, consisting of 20 trials, participants grouped a series of words related to intelligence and personality into either the intelligence category, presented on the left
side of the screen, or the personality category, presented on the right side of the screen. In the second task, consisting of 20 trials, participants grouped a series of stimuli words related to variability and stability into either the stable category, presented on the left side of the screen, or the variable category, presented on the right side of the screen. In the third task, consisting of 20 trials, participants grouped both sets of words into combined categories, either fitting within a combined intelligence and stable category, presented on the left side of the screen, or a combined personality and variable category, presented on the right side of the screen. The fourth task, consisting of 40 trials, was the same as the third. The fifth task, consisting of 40 trials, switched the side of the screen on which the categories were presented, with personality presented on the left side and intelligence presented on the right side of the monitor. The sixth task, consisting of 20 trials, mixed the category pairings such that personality was grouped with stable, presented on the left side of the screen, and intelligence was grouped with variable, presented on the right side of the monitor. The seventh task, consisting of 40 trials was the same as the sixth task. Participants’ IAT scores were calculated using the Greenwalds’s improved Algorithm (Greenwald et al. 2003). For this algorithm, the average latencies for tasks 3,4 , 6 , and 7 are used. A difference score for tasks 6 and 3 as well as a difference score for tasks 7 and 4 is then calculated. These difference scores are divided by the pooled standard deviation of the respective tasks (e.g., the difference score for tasks 6 and 3 divided by the pooled deviation of tasks 6 and 3). Finally, the average of the two quotients yields the participant’s IAT score (Greenwald et al. 2003).

Self-theories implicit bias scores were used to create three groups: more negative scores indicated participants believed intelligence to be more variable than personality (intelligence variable group), more positive scores indicated participants believed personality to be more variable than intelligence (personality variable group), and scores falling in the middle indicated a lack of bias in either direction (unbiased group). See Table 2 for means and standard deviations by group. However, grouping respondents’ scores on the Theories of Intelligence questionnaire and the Implicit Theories of Personality is a well-established method of comparing respondents’ beliefs about the variability of intelligence and personality across a number of variables (Dweck 2000). Grouping participants’ implicit bias scores by the strength of variability mindset was done to parallel theory and previous analyses (Dweck 2000). We employed an extremes group approach in accordance with the recommendations of Preacher et al. (2005). Implicit bias scores were divided at quartiles with the highest (>.28)(>.28) and lowest (<−.12)(<-.12) quartiles representing extreme beliefs (Preacher et al. 2005) and the middle two quartiles grouped together. Following recommendations by Preacher et al. (2005), our groupings were both theoretically and empirically derived, we eschewed dichotomization of the

Constant

Fig. 1 Example implicit association test item
data, and, most importantly, the middle grouping was not excluded from the analysis. On the contrary, the middle group was the grouping of primary interest, and we analyzed all available cases.

Results

A one-way analysis of variance revealed a significant effect on mindfulness by implicit belief group, F(2,150)=4.97,p=.008F(2,150)=4.97, p=.008 (Fig. 2). Participants indicating a stronger implicit bias towards the variability of intelligence (IV group: M=120.56,SD=M=120.56, \mathrm{SD}= 10.27) as well as participants holding stronger implicit bias towards the variability of personality (PV group: M=121.16M=121.16, SD=13.41\mathrm{SD}=13.41 ) reported lower levels of mindfulness than the group reporting relative equivalency in their beliefs about the stability and variability of both personality and intelligence (neutral group: M=127.61,SD=14.49M=127.61, \mathrm{SD}=14.49 ). The mindfulness facets generally conformed to the same pattern as the overall mindfulness score, with the more neutral group typically reporting greater trait mindfulness. In other words, respondents indicating less implicit bias towards the variability of personality and intelligence were more mindful than those demonstrating an implicit bias.

Discussion

The present study sought to explore the relationship between mindfulness and self-theories with a novel application of the

Table 1 Implicit association test group categories and associated words

Table 2 Means and standard deviations by implicit belief group

implicit association test. No study to our knowledge has used an IAT to assess incremental and entity mindsets or in relation to mindfulness. Study findings offer preliminary support for the hypothesized negative relationship between dispositional mindfulness and extreme or biased self-theories. Results indicate that dispositional mindfulness may be linked with the conceptualization of the self. With unbiased respondents evidencing significantly higher levels of dispositional mindfulness in comparison to respondents with more biased beliefs about the variability of intelligence and personality, findings suggest that mindful individuals may develop appraisals and characterizations about the self with less bias from past associations or preconceived notions.

Previous research suggests that viewing intelligence and personality as changeable (e.g., incremental mindset) is associated with positive outcomes both personally and academically (Dweck 2000, 2006; Haimovitz et al. 2011). Believing that personal or intellectual development is the result of effort and not necessarily a genetic predisposition may promote a sense of control or autonomy and motivate sustained attempts at personal or academic development-especially when challenged or confronted with adversity (Dweck 2000). However, when an individual encounters repeated failures, the incremental mindset might also result in learned helplessness, a perceived lack of control, and self-blame (Maier and Seligman 1976). Moreover, extreme incremental beliefs (i.e., viewing intelligence and personality as overly malleable) may elicit feelings of anxiety due to an unstable experience of the self, a lack of identity, or foundational self-perception. Our results appear to offer support for the notion that more mindful people approach self-related concepts with less implicit bias and are neither wedded to incremental or entity beliefs but open to genuine experiences in the moment that are less colored by bias or preconceptions. In other words, reduced implicit bias may promote the appraisal of each person, situation, or experience on a case-by-case basis, instead of operating from fixed schemas.

Limitations resulting from a lack of precise demographic data (a posteri data collection indicate that the sample is representative of the larger College of Education population) and the use of a novel version of the IAT for this study should be considered. Given the relatively high academic functioning of this sample with respect to this study’s emphasis on self-theories of intelligence, results should be generalized with caution. In addition, in light of the fact that the administration of measures was kept consistent across subjects, instrumentation order effects are

Fig. 2 Participants’ mean trait mindfulness score by implicit belief grouping
possible. Future studies should consider use a counterbalanced design. Nevertheless, these results suggest interesting implications for both clinical and academic settings. As mindfulness can be developed through practice (Carmody and Baer 2008), further research will help clarify the relationship between mindfulness and extreme beliefs. For instance, a comparison of long-term contemplatives with non-contemplatives on the Self-Theories IAT would provide a clearer understanding of the relationship between dispositional mindfulness and extreme beliefs. Moreover, future studies could explore the role of state mindfulness in extreme beliefs by employing an experimental design to compare Self-Theories IAT scores for participants following a mindfulness induction versus a variety of control conditions (e.g., thought suppression induction).

Recent theorizing on mindfulness (e.g., Holzel et al. 2011) points to the use of contemplative practices in examining and transforming self-concept, softening more rigid beliefs, and reducing biases. More specifically, mindfulness is thought to be largely incompatible with extreme thinking (Hanh 1998). Vago and Silbersweig (2012) contend that mindful awareness plays a central role in reducing biases through the illumination of “subject-object relations” (Vago and Silbersweig 2012, p.296)-of which the self may be taken as a central object. Mindfulness training is thought to improve insight into an objects’ true nature by virtue of its ability to prolong the moment of “bare attention” to the object (Gunarantana 1992), tempering emotional or cognitive associations that might otherwise distort perception or experience. Indeed, mindfulness has been hypothesized to facilitate more accurate primary appraisals of experience (Garland 2007) and found to reduce cognitive bias toward emotionally salient stimuli (Garland and Howard 2013).

From Nagarjuna (Garfield 1995) to Aristotle’s Golden Mean (Aristotle and Woods 2005), cross-cultural warnings about balance, biases, and extreme beliefs have been offered since
antiquity. Varela contends that mindful reflection “can cut the chain of habitual thought patterns and preconceptions, open[ing]…possibilities other than those contained in one’s current representation of the life space” (Varela et al. 1991, p. 27). Future experimental research is needed to determine whether the cultivation of mindful awareness may facilitate a reorientation of perspective, reducing biases and extreme beliefs while producing a clearer understanding of the object of contemplation.

Appendix

In each of the following tests, you will be asked to put words into categories, using the keys on your keyboard. Put your middle or index fingers on the Q and P keys on your keyboard. Words representing the categories at the top will appear one-by-one in the middle of the screen. When the item belongs to a category on the left, press the Q key; when the item belongs to a category on the right, press the P key. Items belong to only one category.

The Q key indicates the category on the LEFT.
The P key indicates the category on the RIGHT.
Please complete this survey as quickly as possible. It is alright to make a few mistakes, but taking the survey too slow will lead to uninterpretable results. If you make a mistake, the item will not change until you correct the mistake by hitting the correct key.

The following is a list of category labels and the items that belong to each of those categories.

Keep in mind

• Keep your index fingers on the “q” and “p” keys to enable rapid response.
• Two labels at the top will tell you which words or images go with each key.
• Each word or image has a correct classification. Most of these are easy.
• The test gives no results if you go slow-Please try to go as fast as possible.
• Expect to make a few mistakes because of going fast. That’s OK.
• For best results, avoid distractions and stay focused.

Press any key to continue

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