My friend Robert Wright recently gave a terrific talk here at Stevens about his bestseller Why Buddhism Is True. He argues that Buddhism has correctly diagnosed humanity’s problem. We are victims of our own incessant desires, never satisfied for long. The treatment for this problem is meditation, which can give us distance from and hence reduce our cravings and other negative emotions.
Meditation not only makes us happier, Wright says, it also makes us nicer, less selfish, more considerate of others. He has observed these changes within himself, and he claims that meditation, if widely practiced, can help us overcome the aggression and tribalism that cause war and other harmful behaviors. “I think the salvation of the world can be secured via the cultivation of calm, clear minds and the wisdom they allow,” he declares in Why Buddhism Is True.
Because I’m not a very nice person (in spite of taking a meditation class since last fall), I question Wright’s linkage of meditation to moral behavior. Throughout history, warriors have meditated or prayed before battle so they can fight more effectively. Moreover, a disturbing number of meditation teachers have behaved more like sociopaths than saints. The way that Buddhists in Myanmar have treated a Muslim minority also gives me pause.
But these are anecdotes. Now a peer-reviewed report has cast doubt on the claim that meditation makes you nicer. Titled “The limited prosocial effects of meditation: A systematic review and meta-analysis,” the study was carried out by psychologists Ute Kreplin, Miguel Farias and Inti Brazil. “Our primary aim in this article,” they write, “is to examine the extent to which the use of meditation-based techniques in healthy populations, outside of a religious context, might lead to improvements in prosociality. In other words, can meditation per se make the world a better–less aggressive and more compassionate–place?”
The researchers began by identifying thousands of studies on meditation’s positive effects. They winnowed this number down to 22 studies, with a total of 1,685 subjects, that met minimal standards of rigor, including the comparison of meditators to a control group. The studies, all published since 2004, examined meditation’s effects on one or more of these prosocial and antisocial traits: compassion, empathy, connectedness, aggression and prejudice.
In just under half of the studies, the meditation teacher was an author of the study, introducing a possible source of bias. The researchers emphasize that meditators might also be biased by their expectations of self-improvement, and “only one of the studies we examined controlled for expectation effects.” This concern is especially pertinent, given that most studies of meditation measure subjects’ self-reported benefits.
The researchers found that meditation “might make one feel moderately more compassionate or empathic, but our findings suggest that these effects may be, at least in part, the result of methodological frailties, such as biases introduced by the meditation teacher, the type of control group used and the beliefs and expectations of participants about the power of meditation.” In other words, meditation does not work that well at making people nicer. My take-away is that if you want to save the world, there might be more productive things you can do than meditating.
John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings, which is part of the College of Arts & Letters. This column is adapted from one originally published on his Scientific American blog, “Cross-check.”
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