Spirituality Studies 9-1 Spring 2023 79 Russell Suereth Russell Suereth, MA. is researching the significance of everydayness in religion and how compassion could be incorporated into intelligent machines. His dissertation topic, conducted at Salve Regina University, focuses on the role of mindfulness and everyday creativity in the resolution of social categorization. He can be reached at russell.suereth@salve.edu. 1 Introduction The problem this article addresses is social categorization in the context of mindfulness. Although the problem of social categorization is significant because it affects every person, the scope of the article is smaller. Because it is in the context of mindfulness, the article investigates the problems of social categorization from a mindful approach. For example, the social categorization research focuses on aspects associated with mindfulness. Similarly, the mindfulness and Buddhism research focuses on aspects associated with social categorization. Here, Buddhist mindfulness is a means against human biases that influence us to categorize people socially. Accordingly, the resolution this article considers is also in the context of mindfulness. In other words, the considered resolution may have benefits where a person is already mindful but may be incongruous where a person does not exercise mindfulness. In social categorization, we classify people into groups. We place people with attributes like our own into the same groups we belong to, called ingroups, while those different from us are placed into outgroups (Liberman, Woodward, and Kinzler 2017, 556). Social categorization is challenging because we tend to categorize everyone without thinking about it. For example, we categorize the person walking down the sidewalk and the person we see in a store. We do this categorization mainly by looking at a person’s physical features because we know little else about that person. Furthermore, when we place people into an outgroup, they appear more like others in their outgroup and more different from us. Over time, differences grow between our group and others. These differences often turn negative, leading to prejudice, discrimination, and eventually hatred (Brown 2010, 66). ←← Presence by Martin Dojčár, 2019.
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy MzgxMzI=