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

Marius Golubickis* (Corresponding Author), Lucy B. G. Tan, Sara Saini, Kallum Catterall, Aleksandra Morozovaite, Colin Macrae

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

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Abstract

Recent research has suggested 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 either to 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-based meditation eliminated a pre-stimulus bias toward self-relevant (vs. friend-relevant) responses 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.
Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)341–349
Number of pages9
JournalPsychonomic Bulletin and Review
Volume30
Early online date25 Jul 2022
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 1 Feb 2023

Data Availability Statement

Additional information
Open practices statement
Data are available at the OSF at the following link (https://osf.io/w7zvj/). Experiment 2 was preregistered (https://aspredicted.org/up4gm.pdf).

Keywords

  • self-prioritization
  • ownership effect
  • mindfulness-based meditation
  • drift diffusion model

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