Brief mindfulness intervention attenuates self-serving bias rather than boosts self-enhancement

The relationship between mindfulness and self-enhancement has been a topic of debate in recent years. While some researchers have found that mindfulness practitioners exhibit higher levels of self-enhancement after meditation, others have arrived at the opposite conclusion. These inconsistent findings motivated us to test the effect of a brief mindfulness induction on self-enhancement by using observational measures instead of self-reports. Participants were randomly assigned to a brief mindfulness practice (N = 27) or mind-wandering induction (N = 27) and completed an implicit causality task in which they were asked to attribute the potential cause of 80 self-involved events to one of the antecedent noun phrases (e.g., I/Lucy praised Lucy/me because … was that kind of person). The events could involve the “self” as an actor or recipient, and they could be positive or negative, with verbs biased towards either the first or second noun phrase. Results showed that the mindfulness group exhibited fewer instances of taking credit for positive events but attributed more negatives to themselves relative to the active control group. Moreover, the mindfulness group neither hastened to blame others nor hesitated to assume responsibility for negative events, while the control group exhibited a strong tendency to isolate themselves from negative events. Our findings indicate that mindfulness contributes to cultivating a quiet ego rather than promoting self-enhancement, regardless of whether the context is positive or negative. This finding contributes to a deeper understanding of the value of mindfulness.