Dispositional mindfulness and the nonjudgmental regard towards others: the role on sexual prejudice and transphobia among cisgender heterosexual people

Although several studies examined the relationship between high levels of dispositional mindfulness and low scores of prejudices referred to various social groups, the findings have sometimes been inconsistent. Such inconsistency may be explained by the fact that much research has relied exclusively on self-oriented dispositional mindfulness as predictor of intergroup biases, thus underestimating the role of the nonjudgmental regard towards others. In the current study, we explored the associations between dispositional mindfulness related to the self, Nonjudgmental Regard towards Others (NRO), sexual prejudice, genderism/transphobia and gender bashing. We expected that higher scores on both dimensions of NRO traits (i.e. Ideological Acceptance and Emotion Acceptance) would be negatively associated with sexual preju- dice, genderism/transphobia and gender bashing over mindful traits related to the self. 911 cis-heterosexual participants recruited through Prolific completed the online questionnaire. Dominance analyses were conducted to test our hypotheses. The results partially confirmed the predictions. NRO Emotion Acceptance was the best predictor of sexual prejudice, genderism/transphobia and gender bashing among the mindful traits, above socio-anagraphics, religiosity, political, and ideological variables. However, NRO Ideological Acceptance was not associated with the measures of prejudice. These results suggest that having a nonjudgmental attitude toward others’ emotions bay be a better factor in reducing prejudice. Limitations, future research directions, and social implications are discussed.