Can mindfulness prevent ageism? an experimental study on mindfulness and ageism within an organizational context

• Autor(a) principal: Dias, Vanessa Cristina Rosa
• Data de Publicação: 2014
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10071/9264
• topic: Mindfulness; Ageism; Human resources; Stereotypes; Buddhist psychology; Idadismo; Recursos humanos; Estereótipos; Psicologia budista

Mindfulness has been a hot topic in research and has also conquered many practitioners in our western society. Despite the barriers, research results have been promising – even within the Social Psychology framework. Some recent studies suggest that a brief mindfulness induction (15 minutes) can reduce people’s negative bias and increase positive judgements. Therefore, and addressing the specific case of ageism in an organizational context, we tried to test if these assumptions were applicable to the mission of reducing ageism against older workers in a Recruitment and Selection fictitious context. In our study, 80 participants were randomly assigned to two experimental conditions - 2 (Thinking Condition: Mindfulness vs Mind Wandering) x 2 (CV Condition: Without age vs With age). No interaction or main effects were found in relation to the Thinking Condition. However, a main effect of the CV Condition was found: when age was presented, and contrary to the expected, the majority of participants (76%) selected the older candidate for a job interview; when age was not presented the choice between candidates was quite similar (%older=55%, %younger=46%). A significant main effect of the CV condition was also found in relation to the warmth scale for older workers: when age was not presented, participants perceived older workers as warmer than participants who were in the CV with age condition. We think that, despite the fact we did not obtained interaction effects, mindfulness contributed the obtained results, since participants were in a high mindfulness state among conditions (Mmindfulness=4.42 , SDmindfulness=1.02; Mwandering=3.94 , SDwandering=1.19, in a scale from 0 to 6). Further studies must be done in order to clarify unanswered questions