Unfortunately, qualities such as kindness, tolerance, patience, generosity and courage – inherently
ethical and socioemotional in nature – are often ignored or neglected in contemporary
psychologists’ working definitions of mindfulness. One very popular definition, in fact, equates
mindfulness with people’s beliefs about how absent-minded or carelessly inattentive they feel
themselves to be in everyday life
People who report themselves to be carelessly inattentive are
labeled as low in “mindfulness”, whereas those who report themselves not to be inattentive or
absent-minded in everyday life receive a high “mindfulness” rating. Such definitions of mindfulness
seem a very long way from the kind of mindfulness at the foundation of Buddhist psychology,
mindfulness-based interventions and associated research. These and other definitions of
mindfulness not only create confusion, and distort and redefine mindfulness, but also threaten to
corrupt the adoption, progress and development of mindfulness in Western psychology and
medicine
,
.
Because of academic psychology’s affinity for counting things, such definitions are also used to
create measures of mindfulness based upon respondents’ self-reports. For example, people may
rate themselves over 5 or 10 minutes, based upon statements within the questionnaires, on self-
perceptions of inattentiveness. Researchers then make judgments – I would say erroneously –
based on these brief self-ratings about the mindfulness of research participants. This assigning of
degree of mindfulness takes place 1) without any real evidence even that perceptions match
behavior (and there is a lot of evidence that there is a mismatch between actual behavior and self-
perception when people are asked to assess themselves on positive attributes like courage and
emotional self-control, so why should ability to pay attention be any different?), and 2) based upon
a definition of mindfulness that is, at best, remotely related to the original Buddhist/MBI meaning of
the term.
Assumptions that mindfulness can be and is measured by self-report questionnaires may create a
serious additional problem: in research on personality and social psychology, questionnaires,
rather than direct measures of behavior, have increasingly been relied upon as legitimate
measures of psychological functioning over the last three decades
About 50 years ago, 80%
of personality and social psychological research was based on objective measures of behavior,
whereas today, it seems that this is the case for less than 20% of studies; the other investigations
primarily rely upon self-report questionnaire methods that are relatively inexpensive, quick and
easy to gather data with. This means that questionnaire methods often come to define a
phenomenon like “mindfulness” in psychology. In research studies and scientific meetings,
respondents are then referred to as “more mindful” and “less mindful” people, solely on the basis of
the answers they provide to, say, 16 brief statements that may ask participants about how poorly
they think they pay attention during everyday life (e.g., whether they know where they end up when
they go for a drive, or whether they forget people’s names upon first being introduced)
Later,
when studies are reported in the popular press and other media, such characterizations of
mindfulness become the general definition of the word.
Because such measures can, therefore, create their own reality – in a world where questionnaire
data are often unquestioningly assumed to reflect actual fact and not merely self-perception – this
can lead, and most likely appears already to have led, to a situation in which understandings of
mindfulness and its broader implications are at dramatic variance with the original Buddhist and
MBI connotations.
Additionally, definitions of mindfulness that emphasize attentional aspects – to the exclusion of
intentional qualities that reflect an ethical stance – neglect those very dimensions of Buddhist
psychology that may offer something both unique and revolutionary to Western psychology:
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