The Effect of Mindfulness Meditation on Susceptibility to Misinformation

Eyewitnesses exposed to misleading post-event information often unknowingly incorporate false information into their testimony. The misinformation paradigm is used to study false memories by presenting participants with information about a crime, providing misleading post-event information about the crime, and finally having them complete a memory test. The misinformation effect occurs when participants remember misleading post-event information as having occurred in the original event. The goal of the current study was to examine the effects of a mindfulness induction at different points during a misinformation task on true memories and misinformation effects. Four groups of participants completed a misinformation task; three groups received a mindfulness induction, each at a different time during the task, and one group did not receive a mindfulness induction. It was predicted that misleading post-event information would be incorporated into memory most often when mindfulness was induced before the post-event information and least often when mindfulness was induced before the original information. It was also predicted that the endorsement of true items would be similar in pre-video and pre-PEI groups and would be higher than the pre-test and control groups. Results indicated that all groups showed a misinformation effect, but the size of the effect did not differ across conditions. There were also no significant differences in endorsing true information across conditions. These findings suggest that a brief mindfulness induction does not affect susceptibility to the misinformation effect. Limitations and future directions for research are discussed.