Dispositional mindfulness moderates the association between social value orientation and in-group love and out-group hate

Abstract

Literature showed that dispositional mindfulness is associated with several benefits, but especially acting with awareness reduces the automatic and habitual behaviors. In this study, we explored the moderating role of acting with awareness, on the relationship between social value orientation and individuals’ in-group-love vs. outgroup-hate. We hypothesized that acting with awareness would reduce the automatic and habitual proclivity of prosocial individuals to prefer in-group love and the tendency of proself individuals to prefer out-group hate. Moderated regression analyses were conducted on 103 Dutch university students (73.80% female; Mage = 23.62, SDage = 7.27), that participated to the Ingroup Prisoner’s Dilemma-Maximizing Difference- Game (IPD-MD) and completed a questionnaire which contained demographic information and measures of dispositional mindfulness and social value orientation. Firstly, findings showed a significant model on the difference score between ingroup-love and outgroup-hate, confirming that prosocial participants showed more ingroup-love and less out-group hate, compared to proself participants. Two further moderated regression analyses on ingroup-love and outgroup-hate respectively, indicated that acting with awareness moderated the association of social value orientation both with ingroup-love, and with outgroup-hate, in the expected directions. All the models explained a proportion of variance of dependent variables larger than zero. In some cases, mindfulness is not optimal per se and it can have unexpected detrimental consequences. Our study provides a first look into the potentially more negative consequences of mindfulness, providing a contribution to the growing literature about mindfulness, that often focused solely on its positive effects.