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

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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.

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Notes

  1. As a check, we have also run the moderated regression analysis with the third behavioral choice (i.e. individualistic behavior) as dependent variable. As expected, the results did not show statistically significant results neither for the two main effects of AwA and SVO, nor for their interaction, corroborating our predictions. Because this dependent variable was not the focus of our study, this moderated regression analysis is not further reported.

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Availability of Data and Material

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.

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This study was not funded by any grant.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Social and Developmental Psychology, Faculty of Medicine and Psychology, Sapienza University, Rome, Italy

    Marco Salvati & Mauro Giacomantonio

  2. Department of Psychology, University of Amsterdam, Amsterdam, Netherlands

    Femke Ten Velden

Authors
  1. Marco Salvati
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  2. Mauro Giacomantonio
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  3. Femke Ten Velden
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Contributions

MS executed the study, contributed to conduct data analyses, and wrote the paper.

MG designed the study, contributed to conduct data analyses, and edited the final manuscript.

FTV collaborated with the design and edited the final manuscript.

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Correspondence to Marco Salvati.

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The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest and no competing financial interests exist.

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All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were conducted in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and national research committee and with the 1964 Declaration of Helsinki and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards. This article does not refer to any studies with animals performed by any of the authors. The research received approval by the Ethical Committee of XXX (Removed for blinded revision) University.

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Salvati, M., Giacomantonio, M. & Ten Velden, F. Dispositional mindfulness moderates the association between social value orientation and in-group love and out-group hate. Curr Psychol 41, 3625–3631 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12144-020-00853-7

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