Can We Reduce Our Implicit Prejudice Toward Persons with Disability? The Challenge of Meditation

Abstract

The present research further extends recent data revealing implicit attitude towards persons with disability, with the aim to explore if meditation practice can reduce automatic mental processes initiating prejudice. Forty adult experienced meditators and 34 meditation-naïve individuals performed an evaluative priming task. None of them presented any disability. Results show important discrepancies between control and meditation practicing participants: subliminal disability-priming inhibited evaluation of positive words and facilitated evaluation of negative words in the control group, thus revealing the presence of an implicit prejudice toward people with disability. In the meditator group, a quite different pattern of results emerged: disability-priming did not affect the evaluation of words, whether positive or negative. These findings suggest that meditation practice could deter automatised categorisation. They provide a hopeful message in the limited current armamentarium for decreasing negative attitudes towards persons with disability.

Keywords:

• Automatic reactivity
• automaticity
• categorisation
• disability
• executive control
• implicit prejudice
• meditation
• mental processes