Can mindfulness reduce bias?

A paper in Social Psychological and Personality Science:

“Research has shown that mindfulness can positively affect peoples’ lives in a number of ways, including relying less on previously established associations. We focused on the impact of mindfulness on implicit age and racial bias as measured by implicit association tests (IATs). Participants listened to either a mindfulness or a control audio and then completed the race and age IATs. Mindfulness meditation caused an increase in state mindfulness and a decrease in implicit race and age bias. Analyses using the Quad Model showed that this reduction was due to weaker automatically activated associations on the IATs.”

Unfortunately, the paper is behind a pay wall so I am not able to comment in depth. For a popular account of the IAT, here is a good piece from Mother Jones.

This video gives an overview of the IAT: