MINDFULNESS INCREASES PROSOCIAL BEHAVIOUR

New research published in Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin provides evidence that mindfulness meditation training results in increases in prosocial behaviour, even in the absence of explicit ethics-based instructions.

The study author Daniel R Berry PhD, pictured, who is an assistant professor at California State University San Marcos, states:

Based on our lab’s experimental research, we believed that training in mindfulness promotes positive interpersonal outcomes through social cognitive changes that entail how we pay attention to others’ needs in social interactions.

The interesting finding is that mindfulness need not rely on appeals to act ethically.

The study does include some caveats. One such caveat is that the effects of mindfulness training on prosocial behaviour were only reliable when prosocial behaviour was measured immediately after the training concluded. 

Secondly, Dr Berry has stated that one must be in careful interpreting the effects showing that mindfulness reduces prejudice. Specifically, most studies of prejudice in the study’s meta-analysis did not use social ingroup as a reference to examine the gap in prosocial behaviour between social ingroup and outgroup members. Thus, mindfulness may be increasing prosocial behaviour toward others in general but not closing the gap in helping that typically favours ingroup members. More research is needed in that regard.

Study: Daniel R Berry et al. ‘Does Mindfulness Training Without Explicit Ethics-Based Instruction Promote Prosocial Behaviors? A Meta-Analysis.’ Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin. Vol 46, Issue 8, 2020. First Published January 23, 2020.