Mindfulness meditation proponents often tout it as a way to create a more compassionate society. But that claim seems a bit dubious upon first glance.
After all, meditation is an internal affair—focusing on our own experiences, emotions, and thoughts—and people generally meditate alone. What does that have to do with how we treat anyone else? While some meditation practices directly aim for increasing compassion—such as loving-kindness meditation—others focus more on creating mindful attention, a focus on one’s present experience. This seem less likely to automatically impact how we relate to others.
Yet evidence is mounting that mindfulness meditation proponents might be right. Though the science is far from conclusive, it points to the likelihood that mindfulness meditation does lead to “prosocial” (kind and caring) feelings and thoughts, and more compassionate behavior towards others. And it may do so by training people in mindful awareness.
“Almost any approach for cultivating care for others needs to start with paying attention,” says Stanford researcher Erika Rosenberg. “The beginning of cultivating compassion and concern, or doing something for the benefit of others, is first noticing what something or someone means to you.”
A gateway to caring behavior
One recent study in the Journal of Experimental Psychology took a stab at figuring out the relationship between mindfulness meditation and prosocial behavior.
Daniel Berry and his colleagues randomly assigned some participants to either a brief mindfulness training or a training in controlling their attention. The mindfulness training involved focusing on momentary inner experiences: the breath, thoughts, feelings, and body sensations; the attention training involved focusing on important goals in your life.
Then, participants played an online game called Cyberball. “Players” (represented by colored dots) tossed the ball to each other; but after a few tosses, two of the players excluded the third. Though participants were told the dots represented real people located in other rooms, the interactions were actually pre-programmed.
Initially, participants simply observed the game in action. Afterwards, they were asked to write emails to each player in the game, saying “whatever they wanted.” Their responses to the excluded victim were coded by independent raters for warmth, which served as one measure of prosocial behavior. In addition, researchers surveyed how concerned participants were for the victim and how distressed they themselves felt after the game.
Participants then played a second Cyberball game with the players they’d just observed. How often the participant threw the ball to the previously excluded victim was considered a second measure of prosocial behavior.
The findings showed that participants who had trained in mindfulness reported feeling more empathic concern for excluded players—meaning, they felt more tender, sympathetic, and compassionate toward them—but not more distress themselves, compared to simple attention training. They also expressed more warmth in their emails to victims and threw the ball more frequently to them, demonstrating that these feelings were tied to compassionate action. The results also held among a different group of people who didn’t receive any training, but reported on surveys that they were more mindful to begin with.
Berry was not surprised by these findings.
“From the philosophical and religious traditions from which mindfulness comes, it’s been long understood that practicing meditation, and cultivating mindfulness, in particular, can conduce to virtuous action,” he says.
So how did mindfulness impact prosocial action? When the mindfulness training induced higher levels of empathic concern in people, they helped the victims more—providing one potential explanation. Increased attention alone, on the other hand, didn’t seem to play a role. This means that mindfulness must be doing more than just increasing how much people notice that someone is suffering, Berry explains; it must be actually increasing their concern.
This means that mindfulness must be doing more than just increasing how much people notice that someone is suffering, Berry explains; it must be actually increasing their concern.
These findings fit well with Rosenberg’s views. While paying attention is the “gateway” to more caring behavior—allowing you to notice that someone is suffering or that your actions are hurting someone—it’s not enough to elicit action. “You still have to have the motivation to care,” she says.
In additional experiments, Berry and his colleagues ruled out other potential explanations for the positive effects of mindfulness. For example, they compared mindfulness training to a progressive muscle relaxation training, and found the same results favoring mindfulness. They even tried measuring whether mindfulness meditation increased outrage toward the perpetrators in the game, rather than concern for victims. But these factors didn’t change the outcome: People who received mindfulness instruction still felt more empathic concern, and in turn acted more compassionately.
“I think there’s evidence to suggest that the default state of humans is to be focused on the self,” says Berry. “Perhaps what mindfulness does is temporarily break us from that self-focus so that we can be other-oriented.” Indeed, one recent study found that more mindful people are also less concerned with goals that protect their self-image, such as getting recognition from others or avoiding showing any weakness. They care more about compassion-oriented goals—like giving only constructive comments to others or avoiding doing any harm to others.
Mindfulness meditation makes you kind
Of course, Berry’s study was done in a lab with college students, and we don’t know if these findings translate into the real world—or how long the caring feelings and behavior will last after such a short mindfulness practice. But other research seems to point in the same direction.
In her own research, Rosenberg has found that when people practice meditation over a longer period and are then exposed to videos of people suffering, they not only have increased prosocial emotions like compassion, but they have lower “rejection emotions,” like disgust and contempt. This held true even when meditators witnessed someone suffering who was more difficult to find compassion for—like American soldiers bragging about killing Iraqis.
“It’s one thing to show compassion for the victims, it’s another level—really getting it—to show compassion for the perpetrators,” she says.
In a 2015 study, students who used a meditation app for three weeks were more likely to offer a chair to a distressed student entering a waiting room on crutches—even when other students didn’t offer help—than a group who had u