Community safety through mindfulness: a study on Chinese Grid Workers’ risk reporting behavior

Existing literature highlights the role of mindfulness in enhancing safety and reliability across various organizational contexts. However, its impact on community safety behavior remains underexplored, and the mechanism through which mindfulness operates is not fully understood. This paper focuses on China’s most fundamental social governance unit—the Grid (网格)—which is responsible for identifying and issuing early warning. Conducting a scenario-based survey among Grid Workers in two regions (N = 1116), this study employs Propensity Score Matching and Ordered Logistic Regression to address two key questions: whether mindfulness enhances risk information reporting and how it influences resistance to cognitive bias. The findings reveal that: (1) mindfulness significantly increases the likelihood of risk information reporting; and (2) mindfulness does not mitigate familiarity heuristic or help deservingness heuristic bias. Surprisingly, mindfulness appears to amplify the impact of the help deservingness heuristic. The results suggest that promoting mindfulness among community front line workers can enhance risk detection and response, thereby contributing to public safety. However, the study indicates that mindfulness has limited efficacy in reducing cognitive biases.