Toward a Mindful Psychological Science: Theory and Application

Although I am partial to holistic constructs such as cognitive style that integrate various subfields of psychology, Langer's work on mindfulness/mindlessness also has implications for our understanding of more basic cognitive processes. Some of these implications are delineated as follows.

Decision making. In contrast to most theories of decision making that have stressed either the rational or irrational nature of the process, Langer has proposed a third alternative view, namely, that decision making, regardless of whether it is rational or irrational, is in actuality a myth. As she (1994) has stated,

the processes that are most generally understood as leading to decisions, such as integrating and weighing information in a cost-benefit analysis, most often are a postdecision phenomenon, if they occur at all. Instead, according to this model, information gathering is undertaken to make options that appear the same, look different. The information search ends when one reaches a cognitive commitment ... once a cognitive commitment is reached, choice follows mechanically, without calculation. (p. 34)

In line with this, Langer (1997) has also begun to explore the related processes of risk and probability, having noted that "once we generate possible ways of doing something, even if they are low probability bets, the perception of a solution's being possible increases enormously" (p. 5). Such theory sets the stage for the future development of important work on probability, risk, and decision making (cf. Langer, 1975), topics with much relevance for contemporary cognitive developmentalists.

Language. In an extremely important article, Langer (1992a) has documented the mindless use of language, which allows us to "unwittingly construct our interpersonal world while believing we are only accurately reflecting it" (p. 324). That is, providing the examples of rigid/consistent, inconsistent/flexible, impulsive/spontaneous, plodding/planful, grim/serious, and silly/lighthearted, she has persuasively demonstrated that we have positive and negative vocabularies (learned mindlessly in childhood as labels; cf. Werner, 1940/1957), and that "values tend to drive the choices we make in communicating with others, although that speech appears value-free" (p. 325). In another example relevant to my own work (e.g., Demick, 1991), Langer (1992a) has documented that

the very same data may be considered by the individual yet lead to very different conclusions. ... Work on field dependence has shown that women are more field dependent than men. That is, women are less able to separate figure from ground. If one valued women's behavior more, one might have found, with these same data, that women are more field sensitive than men. That is, women might be better able to integrate figure and ground. (p. 325)

Such an approach makes her one of those rare psychologists who explicitly treat the extremely important, though often neglected, role of values in human functioning and development (cf. Kendler, 1999; Wapner & Demick, 1998), an area that clearly requires increased attention in future psychological research.