Brief Online Socio-Cognitive Mindfulness Interventions Neither Improve Socio-Cognitive Mindfulness nor Cognitive Biases: A Two-Study Conceptual Replication and Reanalysis of a Randomized Controlled Trial

Objectives: Evidence on the link between socio-cognitive (Langerian) mindfulness and cognitive biases is scarce. A recent study reported that a brief online socio-cognitive mindfulness intervention substantially improved performance in a variety of cognitive-bias tasks. The current report attempted to replicate this finding with considerably larger samples, using two preregistered studies, and reanalyzed open data of the original study. Method: Two randomized controlled trials (RCTs; n = 591, n = 335) were conducted online. Both RCTs measured performance in various cognitive-bias tasks (11 in Study 1, 13 in Study 2) after receiving the purported main component (Study 1) or the full intervention (Study 2) from the original study, compared to a passive control condition. Study 2 also examined differences in socio-cognitive mindfulness between the intervention and control groups. Exploratory analyses investigated the associations between cognitive biases and age, gender, education, trait meditative mindfulness, rationality, and cognitive reflection, and reanalyzed open data from the original study (n = 109). Results: Intervention and control groups did not differ in cognitive-bias task performance or socio-cognitive mindfulness in either the two replication studies or the original RCT, according to both standard parametric and nonparametric tests. Performance in the cognitive-bias tasks was associated with participant characteristics (gender, age), meditation practice, trait meditative mindfulness, rationality, and cognitive reflection. Conclusions: Brief socio-cognitive mindfulness interventions may neither induce relevant socio-cognitive mindful states nor reduce cognitive biases. Measures of cognitive bias and socio-cognitive mindfulness need more research. Future studies should investigate longer interventions. Preregistration: Study 1 was preregistered at aspredicted.org (#93190) on April 5, 2022. Study 2 was preregistered at aspredicted.org (#127897) on April 6, 2023.