New study finds brief mindfulness may heighten stereotype bias

A few minutes of breathing is not a universal fix for bias. In two randomized, double-blinded trials, Elena Vieth and Lisa von Stockhausen found that brief mindful breathing increased the effect of stereotype bias on decision-making, while progressive muscle relaxation reduced biased choices in stereotype-incongruent trials.

The paper, published April 30, 2026 in PLOS One as “Effects of mindful breathing meditation on stereotype expression in two randomized controlled double-blinded trials,” tested mindful breathing against relaxation training and a podcast-listening control. Experiment 1 included 45 minutes of training total; Experiment 2 used 80 minutes total. In both experiments, the breathing meditation moved stereotype bias in the wrong direction from the authors’ expectation, and the findings came out contrary to their hypothesis.

That matters for the way mindfulness gets packaged in workplaces, schools, and community groups. A short breathing reset can still be useful when the goal is to calm arousal, settle after stress, or create a cleaner transition between tasks. But if the goal is to change rapid social judgment, this study suggests that a brief, breathing-focused practice on its own is too blunt a tool. In this experiment, relaxation training did the better job of reducing biased decision-making when the trial presentation conflicted with the stereotype.

The new results also land in the middle of an already mixed research record. An American Psychological Association summary of work by Kimberly Ingold and Adam Lueke reported that a brief mindfulness intervention reduced endorsement of negative Black stereotypes in neutral conditions, but did not buffer against stress. A 2022 study on adolescents, led by Martina Rahe and Petra Jansen, found that a short mindfulness induction improved mental rotation performance while also increasing male stereotype beliefs and perceived ability in masculine activities. That is the pattern readers in this field already know well: mindfulness effects can be real, but they are often context-dependent and sometimes spill into places nobody expects.

Vieth and von Stockhausen frame their findings the same way researchers should frame a result like this, as preliminary and hypothesis-generating. All of the data and code are publicly available on the Open Science Framework, and the study received no specific funding. The takeaway is not that mindfulness has failed. It is that a breathing script, stripped down to a few short sessions and handed the job of changing bias, may be asking too much.