Mapping a Culture of Mindfulness: Lay Conceptions of Mindfulness and Why They Matter
Mindfulness May 11, 2026 Patton Burchett, Adrian J. Bravo, Mark Mclaughlin et al.
Lay people's understanding of mindfulness varies with their level of contemplative experience. A mixed-methods study of 100 US participants (50 inexperienced college students and 50 experienced community members) identified six categories of mindfulness definitions: religious/spiritual/philosophical, attention/observing, calming and grounding, tenets of MBSR, virtue cultivation, and awareness. Experienced participants more often defined mindfulness as attention/observing and as aligned with MBSR tenets, and they more frequently endorsed that mindfulness reveals no substantive self and is a specific type of meditation. Inexperienced participants more often defined mindfulness as calming/grounding and as awareness, and they were more likely to see mindfulness as distinct from meditation. These findings suggest that prior contemplative experience shapes how people conceptualize mindfulness.