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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.
Emerging evidence suggests that meditation engenders prosocial behaviors meant to ben- efit others. However, the robustness, underlying mechanisms, and potential scalability of such effects remain open to question. The current experiment employed an ecologically valid situation that exposed participants to a person in visible pain. Following three-week, mobile-app based training courses in mindfulness meditation or cognitive skills (i.e., an ac- tive control condition), participants arrived at a lab individually to complete purported mea- sures of cognitive ability. Upon entering a public waiting area outside the lab that contained three chairs, participants seated themselves in the last remaining unoccupied chair; confed- erates occupied the other two. As the participant sat and waited, a third confederate using crutches and a large walking boot entered the waiting area while displaying discomfort. Compassionate responding was assessed by whether participants gave up their seat to allow the uncomfortable confederate to sit, thereby relieving her pain. Participants’ levels of empathic accuracy was also assessed. As predicted, participants assigned to the mindful- ness meditation condition gave up their seats more frequently than did those assigned to the active control group. In addition, empathic accuracy was not increased by mindfulness practice, suggesting that mindfulness-enhanced compassionate behavior does not stem from associated increases in the ability to decode the emotional experiences of others.