Mindfulness Mitigates Biases You May Not Know You Have | Hacker News Reader

Mindfulness Mitigates Biases You May Not Know You Have

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22 pointsSwellJoe6 comments

> The test group listened to a recording that made them aware of their heart rate and breathing. It told them to accept these sensations and thoughts “without restriction, resistance, or judgment.”

From this excerpt, it seems like the study results may be contaminated by framing (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_%28social_sciences%29) rather than meditation alone. A better study would use an exercise without such terminology.

If there is an effect from meditation, I wonder how permanent the effect is, or if your implicit associations ebb and flow with how mindful you are at any given moment.

That is one example of guided meditation. How is that contamination for a meditation study?

The words in the meditation primed particpants specifically for what they were measuring. They should have used a guided meditation that didn't mention judgement. Or alternatively, give an audio which mentioned these concepts without the meditation bit.

do you mean permanent as in i meditate once, have the benefits - how long do they last? or do you mean if i make a daily practice do the benefits stay? pretty certain (at least for me) meditating is like the gym, you lose your gains once you stop going. just like most things in life you need a little bit every day to keep it in your life. (I can't just eat breakfast once either and be full) having a practice keeps the ebbs and flows in a place where you are acutely aware of it. seeing this stuff being scientifically analyzed is great.

So, how would you control for that? Most folks don't know how to do mindfulness meditation without a bit of guidance, so there's going to need to be some coaching.

Would simply using the same words to another group without the meditation stage of the process be an appropriate control? Or, is it necessary to only use people who already know what mindfulness meditation is? (And if that, how would you control for the other differences longterm mindfulness meditation might have on the study?)

Humans are complicated. I've been reading a lot of this kind of research lately, and I don't think I'm even beginning to grasp how to do rigorous science with the human psyche.

You're right, the human psyche is a difficult to test rigorously. However, mindfulness of the breath is simple can be done without priming the subjects to be "without judgment:" https://thebuddhistcentre.com/text/mindfulness-breathing

Controlling for this particular instance of framing seems doable.

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