Mindfulness Meditation Activates Altruism

Abstract

Clinical evidence suggests that mindfulness meditation reduces anxiety, depression, and stress, and improves emotion regulation due to modulation of activity in neural substrates linked to the regulation of emotions and social preferences. However, less was known about whether mindfulness meditation might alter pro-social behavior. Here we examined whether mindfulness meditation activates human altruism, a component of social cooperation. Using a simple donation game, which is a real-world version of the Dictator's Game, we randomly assigned 326 subjects to a mindfulness meditation online session or control and measured their willingness to donate a portion of their payment for participation as a charitable donation. Subjects who underwent the meditation treatment donated at a 2.61 times higher rate than the control (p = 0.005), after controlling for socio-demographics. We also found a larger treatment effect of meditation among those who did not go to college (p < 0.001) and those who were under 25 years of age (p < 0.001), with both subject groups contributing virtually nothing in the control condition. Our results imply high context modularity of human altruism and the development of intervention approaches including mindfulness meditation to increase social cooperation, especially among subjects with low baseline willingness to contribute.

Figure 1

Distributions of contributions in the mindfulness meditation treatment group versus the control. Notes: Predicted contribution levels using the negative binomial regression model that controls for gender, age, education, race and ethnicity, and geography.

Figure 2

Interaction effects of education and age with the effect of mindfulness meditation treatment on contributions. Notes: (A) The difference in average contributions between the subjects exposed to mindfulness meditation and those in the control condition is significantly larger among subjects who did not attend college than in those who did. (B) The difference in average contributions between the subjects exposed to mindfulness meditation and those in the control condition is significantly larger in the younger group (under 25 years of age) than in the older group (25 years of age and older). In both cases, mean contribution levels and standard errors (adjusted for clustering by region) estimated using the negative binomial regression model with interaction effects (separately for the two cases) and controlling for gender, age, education, race and ethnicity, and geography.