Seven minutes of meditation can reduce racial prejudice, study finds

Seven minutes of meditation can reduce racial prejudice, study finds. A popular meditation technique that's intended to create feelings of kindness can also reduce prejudice, according to new University of Sussex research. The study , published online in the journal Motivation and Emotion , found that just seven minutes of Loving-kindness meditation (LKM), a Buddhist practise that promotes unconditional kindness towards oneself and others, is effective at reducing racial bias. Lead researcher Alexander Stell, a Doctoral student in Psychology, said: "This indicates that some meditation techniques are about much more than feeling good, and might be an important tool for enhancing inter-group harmony." LKM is known to engender happiness and kindness to oneself and others through repeating phrases such as 'may you be happy and healthy' while visualising a particular person. Some previous studies have shown that inducing happiness in people, for example by exposing them to upbeat music, can actually make them more likely to have prejudiced thoughts compared to those hearing sad music. Mr Stell said: "We wanted to see whether doing LKM towards a member of another ethnic group would reduce the automatic preference people tend to show for their own ethnic group." For the study, a sample of 71 white, non-meditating adults were each given a photo of a gender-matched black person and either received taped LKM instructions, or instructions to look at the photos and notice certain features of the face.