AI can be used as a mindfulness contagion.
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In today’s column, I examine a psychological phenomenon known as mindfulness contagion, which is the contention that just as emotion can spread among humans, so can mindfulness. This intriguing topic has already garnered some attention and controversy among psychology researchers. I add to the matter by proposing that modern-era generative AI and large language models (LLMs) can be a catalyst to spur mindfulness contagions.
Whereas an emotional contagion is typically construed as spreading on a human-to-human basis, and likewise for a mindfulness contagion, it would seem reasonable to expect that AI-to-human social contagions might also be feasible. A person using AI could be spurred to become mindful. On a scaling basis, envision millions or hundreds of millions of users of AI being spurred into being mindful. There are a billion people using generative AI on a daily and weekly basis, and some proportion could be potentially stirred into greater mindfulness if the AI was prompted to do so.
Let’s talk about it. This analysis of AI breakthroughs is part of my ongoing Forbes column coverage on the latest in AI, including identifying and explaining various impactful AI complexities (see the link here).
Intertwining AI And Psychology
As a quick background, I’ve been extensively covering and analyzing a myriad of psychological facets regarding the advent of modern-era AI that produces mental health advice and performs AI-driven therapy. This rising use of AI has principally been spurred by the evolving advances and widespread adoption of generative AI and LLMs such as ChatGPT, GPT-5, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, Grok, and others. For a recap of my two hundred analyses and postings about AI and mental health, see the link here and the link here. I frequently speak up about these pressing matters, including in an appearance on an episode of CBS’s 60 Minutes; see the link here.
My efforts are intended to inform and engage in thoughtful dialogue on the pressing issues at hand. There are some that focus only on the upbeat side of AI and others that concentrate solely on the downbeat side of AI. It’s an all-or-nothing proposition, namely that AI is the best thing since sliced bread or the worst monstrosity ever devised. I don’t find those extreme views to provide clarity, nor do they offer a semblance of balance. Let’s be upfront and cover the ins and outs, which allow for cogent discussions and can aid policymakers, lawmakers, researchers, scholars, practitioners, and the like in discovering sensible and suitable paths forward. AI is not going away. AI is here to stay and will increasingly become ubiquitous.
AI And Mindfulness
I adopt the Langerian characterization of mindfulness, which is that a mindful perspective tends to avoid automatic behaviors and enlists a process of actively identifying new distinctions associated with the present situation (per my coverage at the link here). I have shown that generative AI can aid mindfulness in many vital ways; see the link here.
Here are some of the main ways that AI can stir human mindfulness:
- (1) Thinking anew: AI gets a person to reflect thoughtfully on the decisions they make and stirs them toward reviewing their personal preconceptions and staked-out viewpoints in new ways.
- (2) Metacognition-inspiring: AI can stimulate people to think in a big-picture way about how they think.
- (3) Multiple perspectives: People can interact with AI to become more aware of alternative perspectives that they otherwise had not envisioned, such as by invoking the use of AI personas.
- (4) Intellectual curiosity: AI can foster intellectual interests and spur a person toward enhanced intellectual curiosity and mental openness.
- (5) Attention stimulus: AI can get a person to escape from routine thinking and aid them in becoming more attentive to the world around them.
This suggests that a mentally uplifting cycle can ensue. A person may become increasingly mindful as they use AI to train their mind to be expansive. AI is serving as a psycho-educational mechanism that improves mental capacity. Furthermore, ongoing use of AI keeps them on their toes and mitigates potential backsliding into prior dour mental patterns. For the five key prompts that you can use to aid in bolstering your mindfulness, see my discussion at the link here.
A potential downside is that AI can become a dependency. Someone might only be achieving mindfulness by relying on AI as a crutch that continually nudges them toward mindfulness. The prudent and proper aim of employing AI would be to do so as a cognitive-building approach and explicitly steer clear of a persistent reliance on AI for this purpose.
Emotional Contagion
One of the most studied social contagions entails emotional contagion. The idea is straightforward. A person interacts with a fellow human and might be impacted by the emotional state of the discussant, opting to adopt that same emotional state. This can occur on a simple 1-to-1 basis, namely face-to-face with each other. Another possibility is a person speaking to a gathering of people, and those in attendance adopt the emotional state of the speaker. There is a substantial amount of psychological research underlying the phenomenon of emotional contagion.
In a meta-analysis research study entitled “Emotional Contagion: A Brief Overview and Future Directions” by Carolina Herrando and Efthymios Constantinides, Frontiers in Psychology, July 2021, these salient points were made (excerpts):
- “Emotional contagion can be triggered physiologically or neurologically by synchronizing with the emotional state of others during human interactions.
- “In an infamous experiment some years ago, researchers manipulated and transformed people’s emotions on a massive scale through social media posts.”
- “Considering the increasing use of AI as a technology behind new tools based on anthropomorphism (voice assistants, chatbots, robots, etc.), it is important to be aware of the efficacy of such tools as agents of emotional contagion.”
The meta-analysis research indicated that emotional contagion can range from short-lived to long-lived. In other words, the emotional transference or mimicry could be very brief and then fade, or it might be longer-lasting. The researchers also pointed out that social media appears to be a form of emotional contagion, and that AI can also be a form of instigating emotional contagion.
Mindfulness Contagion
If one accepts the premise that there are emotional contagions, it seems reasonable to assume that there could be mindfulness contagions. The premise is that both emotions and mindfulness are socially transmissible phenomena. It is an alluring analogy that seems to make abundant sense.
Not so, some contend. They argue that emotions are easily detected, while mindfulness is a much harder psychological construct to discern. A person chatting with a fellow human can almost immediately realize if the other person is sad, happy, angry, or reflective of some other emotional state. Can you directly tell if another person is mindful? The irony is that you almost need to be mindful to realize when another person is being mindful.
Another issue is that humans seem intrinsically wired to embody emotional states, but whether we are wired to be mindful is a different kettle of fish. Just because you detect that someone else is mindful doesn’t imply that you will be stirred in that same direction. Emotional states are quick and easy to transmit. Mindfulness is hard to detect and seemingly challenging to propagate.
The customary retort is that though mindfulness contagions might be less likely to arise or harder to stir than emotional contagions, that is a far cry from claiming that mindfulness contagions do not exist at all. They are merely beasts of a different kind. They deserve proper and prudent attention. Not all social contagions have to be of the same ilk.
Scale Is Immense
The beauty of AI is that it can readily work on a massive scale. Some estimates indicate that there are around 1.5 billion active users of the popular LLMs; see my analysis at the link here. Imagine what might happen if a mindfulness contagion could be spurred via the use of AI. We could end up with hundreds of millions of people who are more mindful than they’ve ever been, possibly veering into the billions. This would seem extremely heartening.
We can double down on that premise. Of those millions upon millions that become more mindful via AI usage, some of those in turn will spur fellow humans toward being mindful. It is a second-order effect. The first-order effect is AI-to-human. The second-order effect is human-to-human, wherein the humans that were stirred into mindfulness are now serving as a mindfulness contagion of their own. Mindfulness begets mindfulness.
Can we have too much mindfulness in the world?
Some would say that there isn’t such a thing as too much mindfulness. We would all be better off if more people were mindful. A critic or cynic might decry a world of vast mindfulness. Perhaps this would lead to excess mindfulness and be beyond what humankind can reasonably tolerate.
Scale Can Hurt
The massive scaling of AI has an ugly underbelly. If generative AI can influence human cognition on such an enormous scale, such as acting as a global mindfulness contagion, what other less heartening contagions might be in the offing?
We can use mindlessness as an example. The flip side of mindfulness is mindlessness. A casual glance at the world around us might suggest that people are already commonly in the throes of mindlessness. It is a relatively inactive state of mind. I’m sure you encounter mindless people on a routine basis; typically, someone is acting mindlessly when they seem to be preoccupied with past mental distinctions, fail to see their environment in new ways, and appear to be proceeding in a highly regimented or routinized fashion.
AI could spur people toward mindlessness, doing so via a passive mode or an active mode. In the passive mode, the AI does all the cognitive heavy lifting for a user and leaves little room for them to be an active thinker. The active mode goes a step further and tries to convince the user that they would be better off if they adopted a mindless form of cognition. All told, this would certainly be a disheartening outcome of widespread AI.
The World We Are In
An important consideration is whether we are going to allow AI makers to decide our cognitive fate. The AI makers can opt to shape their AI toward spurring human mindfulness or mindlessness. People might not realize that the AI has been tuned for that purpose. Many people seem to assume that whatever AI does is what the AI is doing and aren’t aware that the AI has been shaped by AI makers to satisfy corporate goals.
A final thought for now. Abraham Lincoln famously made this remark: “The most reliable way to predict the future is to create it.” We need more research on the topic of mindfulness contagion. Equally so, we need research on AI-to-human and social contagions, especially associated with mindfulness. Let’s be a creator of our future.
Social Contagions
Before we dive into mindfulness contagions, let’s first consider what a social contagion consists of, along with putting forth the general theory in psychology that there are human-to-human emotional contagions.
The American Psychological Association (APA) online dictionary of psychological terminology defines a social contagion this way:
As noted above, the initial theories about social contagion were that people with heightened suggestibility would be more likely to engage in the social mannerism or behavior that was being spread. This was later revised to reflect that a person doesn’t necessarily have to be susceptible to suggestibility and might be explicitly adopting the social contagion on a more refined basis.