Over the years, there has been an explosion in studies investigating mindfulness as a practice and as a personality trait. Recently, a literature review found that articles that mention mindfulness has been growing exponentially since 2006, with half of them being published in psychology journals.
Studies have found several positive effects of mindfulness training on psychological wellbeing. Studies have also suggested that benefits of mindfulness extend to people who interact with practitioners – friends, children, romantic partners, colleagues, or strangers.
Proponents of this argument have suggested mindfulness increases prosocial behavior (generosity towards others) through several “mechanisms”. For example, by increasing capacity to sustain and direct attention, making them more sensitive to the needs of others and more likely to respond (Donald et al. 2018).
However, other researchers have expressed their skepticism about these findings, citing conceptual and methodological shortcomings – inadequate controls, sample sizes, small effect-sizes or use of self-report measures.
“Academic articles describe weak results as ‘encouraging’ and ‘exciting’; popular best-selling books about mindfulness, many of which are written by researchers, are bursting with magical promises of peace, happiness and well-being.”
Farias and Wikholm, 2016, Has the science of mindfulness lost its mind?
Recently, Simon Schindler and Stefan Pfattheicher investigated whether mindfulness was associated with actual prosocial behavior via two separate studies. Researchers used (1) charitable giving and (2) allocation in a dictator game , both of which are objective measures to see if individual differences in trait mindfulness is associated with generosity towards others.
To measure mindfulness in participants (N=1240), researchers used the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ), a self-assessment questionnaire that is widely used to measure how mindful people are in daily life. In the first study, participants were given a 50-cent bonus and told that they could either keep the money for themselves or donate it to the German Red Cross (a charitable organization) to support them in their fight against COVID-19.
Researchers found no association between mindfulness measured by FFMQ and prosociality measured by how much money participants were willing to donate. The second study used the dictator game to measure prosociality, and this time researchers experimentally manipulated guilt in participants.
Aside on the dictator game: The dictator game is a variant of the ultimatum game. In the ultimatum game, the first player is given a sum of money. The first player is then asked to split the money with another player, but there's a catch. Once Player 1 decides how much to give over and communicates the offer, Player 2 decides whether to accept or reject the offer. If Player 2 accepts, they both get the money as per the proposal. If player 2 rejects, both of them get nothing. In the dictator game, Player 2 is a passive observer. Player 1 (the dictator) decides how much money to give over to player 2. But Player 2 has no say in the matter.
Researchers asked participants to do a task (identify hidden faces in pictures) and told them they would be rewarded with a sum of money on completion. To induce guilt, participants were told that their performance on the tasks would determine the final outcome of another participant “Person A”. In the high guilt condition, participants were told that person A made 0 euro. In the low guilt condition they were told person A made half of they got or the same as them.
Participants then played the dictator game and had a chance to give over some of their earnings from the task to Person A.
Overall, researchers found no positive association between mindfulness and prosocial behavior in the second study. However in one subset of the study (study 2B), mindfulness was found to be negatively associated with prosociality. Researchers think that since one aspect of mindfulness is “nonjudgemental acceptance” of emotions, in this instance it may have led to a decrease in guilt, and resulted in less generous offers to Person A.
Researchers think that the effects of mindfulness on prosociality may be complex. Read more about the study here.
