Knock yourself out: Brief mindfulness-based meditation eliminates self-prioritization

Abstract

Recent research has asserted that self-prioritization is an inescapable facet of mental life, but is this viewpoint correct? Acknowledging the flexibility of social-cognitive functioning, here we considered the extent to which mindfulness-based meditation-an intervention known to reduce egocentric responding-attenuates self-bias. Across two experiments (Expt. 1, N = 160; Expt. 2, N = 160), using an object-classification task, participants reported the ownership of previously assigned items (i.e., owned-by-self vs. owned-by-friend) following a 5-minute period of mindfulness-based meditation compared with control meditation (Expt. 1) or no meditation (Expt. 2). The results revealed that mindfulness meditation abolished the emergence of the self-ownership effect during decision-making. An additional computational (i.e., drift diffusion model) analysis indicated that mindfulness meditation eliminated a prestimulus bias toward self-relevant (vs. friend-relevant) responses, increased response caution, and facilitated the rate at which evidence was accumulated from friend-related (vs. self-related) objects. Collectively, these findings elucidate the stimulus and response-related operations through which brief mindfulness-based meditation tempers self-prioritization.1531-5320Golubickis, Marius <br />Orcid: 0000-0001-6128-0331 <br />Tan, Lucy B G <br />Saini, Sara <br />Catterall, Kallum <br />Morozovaite, Aleksandra <br />Khasa, Srishti <br />Macrae, C Neil <br />Journal Article <br />United States <br />Psychon Bull Rev. 2022 Jul 25. doi: 10.3758/s13423-022-02111-2. <br />