Contemplative science has documented a plethora of intrapersonal benefits stemming from meditation, includ-ing increases in gray matter density (Hölzel, Carmody, et al., 2011), positive affect (Moyer et al., 2011), and improvement in various mental-health outcomes (Hölzel, Lazar, et al., 2011). Strikingly, however, much less is known about the interpersonal impact of meditation. Although Buddhist teachings suggest that increases in compassionate responding should be a primary outcome of meditation (Davidson & Harrington, 2002), little scien-tific evidence supports this conjecture. Even as scientists have begun to examine the effects of meditation on pro-social action, the conclusions that can be drawn with respect to compassion have been limited by designs that lack real-time person-to-person interactions centered on suffering. Previous work, for example, has utilized medi-tators’ self-reported intentions and motivations to behave in supportive manners toward other individuals (e.g., Fredrickson, Cohn, Coffey, Pek, & Finkel, 2008) and com-puter-based economic games requiring cooperation (e.g., Leiberg, Klimecki, & Singer, 2011; Weng et al., 2013) to assess altruistic action. Such methods have suggested that meditation may increase generalized prosocial respond-ing, but have not clearly and objectively gauged responses meant solely to mitigate the suffering of other individuals.To address this gap, we utilized a design in which individuals were confronted with a person in pain in an ecologically valid setting. If, as suggested by Buddhist theorizing, meditation enhances compassionate respond-ing, participants who have completed a brief meditation course should act to relieve such a person’s suffering more frequently than those who have not completed the course.