The central role played by compassion is often ignored, thanks to a historical accident. The scientists who first began to study meditation were primarily neuroscientists and those interested in cognition and memory. … But if you think about it from a historical standpoint, the goals of early meditation teachers … weren’t enhancing test scores or memory. To the contrary, they were centered on fostering ethical decisions and compassionate behavior, … on ending suffering. But because these phenomena were inherently social in nature, they were ignored as neuroscientists turned their lenses on what meditation could do to enhance the information-processing power of the brain. This was a gap I wanted to fill. If meditation, compassion, and self-control were truly linked, … we first needed to find some evidence, and that required studying the effects of meditation in an entirely new way.
The first step in most scientific investigations of meditation is to recruit people …
We now had two groups of people who were equally interested in meditation, but only one of which contained people who actually had some degree of authentic training. … our participants believed that at the end of the eight weeks they’d be coming to the lab to have their cognitive skills tested. Little did they know that the true experiment would begin in the waiting room.
If we wanted to examine meditation’s effects on compassion and self-control, we needed to do it in a fairly normal environment. … In short, we needed to design a challenge that would offer people the opportunity to keep a mild comfort or to give it up to benefit someone in pain. … When our participants arrived in the lab’s waiting room, they saw three chairs. The first two were occupied by actors working for us. So, as you’d expect, each participant (as they were scheduled to come to the lab one at a time) would sit down in the remaining chair to await being called into the lab for testing. After a few minutes had passed, the relative quiet of the waiting room was interrupted by an elevator door sliding open at the opposite end of the hall. Out came a young woman on crutches who had her foot in an orthopedic boot. The woman, who also worked for us, hobbled down the hall, wincing a bit with each step, until she entered the waiting room, where, somewhat dejectedly, she leaned against the wall with a bit of a whimper, as every chair was taken.
What would participants do? If they wanted to act nobly, the answer was clear: offer her their chair. But that meant sacrificing their own immediate comfort to aid another and thus would take some degree of self-control. That might sound like an overstatement on my part, as many people might (and did when we asked them) predict that a solid majority of people placed in this position would have readily offered up their chair. As it turned out, though, only 16 percent of “normal” people in our experiment — and by normal I mean the ones who hadn’t meditated for the previous eight weeks — suggested that the woman in pain take their seat.
This was a dispiriting finding, and sadly it wasn’t a fluke. We ran the experiment a second time and got similar results. Now, truth be told, we were stacking the deck a little. The other people who were sitting in the room when a participant arrived—the actors who didn’t offer their chairs—had been instructed by us to ignore the woman on crutches. They were to read a book or thumb their phones as she entered, appearing to pay her no heed. Yet the sighs and similar sounds of discomfort she uttered were audible enough for everyone to hear, meaning it was clear to our participants that these others were willfully feigning ignorance of the injured woman’s plight. That was the point. This type of mass indifference is specially meant to reduce people’s motivations to help. If nobody else is bothering to assist someone in need, why should you? It’s a pernicious phenomenon known as the bystander effect, and it allows people to stand by passively while all manner of suffering occurs right in front of them. In our experiments it worked all too well.
When we examined the meditators, however, quite a different story emerged. After only eight weeks of mindfulness practice, the percentage of people who felt compassion and sacrificed their own comfort to aid the woman in pain more than tripled, rising to 50 percent. That’s a big difference, and one we and others have been able to replicate using related measures of compassionate behavior. When considered in combination, these findings show how meditation bolsters self-control via compassion. … People often need self-control to act with kindness and generosity. Whether that self-control is aimed at sacrificing to aid others or their own future selves, they need a push to give up their immediate comfort and thereby raise the likelihood that they’ll benefit from a returned favor or a better outcome down the line. And while it’s true that we can remind ourselves daily to be kind and exert the requisite willpower to behave accordingly, practicing mindfulness — a route by which compassion begins to emerge automatically and continuously — offers a better route.”
Excerpted from: David DeSteno. “Emotional Success: The Power of Gratitude, Compassion, and Pride.” Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2017.
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