ABSTRACT
This chapter suggests that mindful attention can help to override automatic mental processes that foster separateness, and can encourage social responses absent a strong overlay of self-identification, offering greater potential for choiceful action. Mindfulness is thought to allow a clear, moment-to-moment glimpse into what one is thinking, feeling, or doing, in which events are “seen” without dominance by conceptual thought. The chapter offers two potential mechanisms by which mindfulness may catalyze intergroup prosociality, namely de-automatization and dis-identification. When mindful attention is brought to self-representations and other thoughts as they arise, change, and fade away, the ephemeral nature of such processes can be “seen,” affording a dis-identification with them. The chapter presents nascent evidence that mindfulness fosters non-defensive attitudes toward social out-group members in three domains: worldview threat, linguistic intergroup bias, and automatic implicit bias. Implicit attitudes are based on automatic associations between two or more constructs in memory.
