How mindfulness could make you selfish
Unravel the unexpected correlation between mindfulness and selfishness. Explore how the pursuit of inner peace might inadvertently foster self-centered tendencies, challenging the conventional wisdom that mindfulness solely promotes empathy and compassion.
The’me’ in meditation
In some contexts, practicing mindfulness can exaggerate some people’s selfish tendencies
- This finding should not be a cause for you to stop meditating, but it adds to a growing body of research suggesting that mindfulness training can have undesirable side effects as well as potential benefits
- Many psychologists now believe that the potentially negative consequences of certain meditative practices should be advertised alongside the hype
Effects of meditation on attitudes
People who took the mindfulness exercise were willing to spend more time on the charitable task.
- If they were already interdependent, then mindfulness had made them even more self-centred, so they were less willing to help the homeless
- Overall, they stuffed around 15% fewer envelopes
‘McMindfulness’
The mindfulness exercise exaggerated the effects of their self-perception, driving increased altruism among the interdependent-minded and decreased altruism for the more independent-minded
- Critics of mindfulness argue that it has become a stripped-down, DIY self-help technique used to get ahead of others
- Some studies suggest mindfulness can heighten anxiety and trigger panic attacks in certain people
- We need more research into the many kinds of mindfulness techniques
- Mindful breathing, which Poulin used in his experiment, is the most popular mindfulness exercise
- Tania Singer, the director of the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig, Germany, has provided some of the strongest evidence for the diverse effects of the different techniques with a detailed nine-month trial
- Over many sessions, the participants completed exercises aimed at improving “presence”, such as mindful breathing, as well as techniques such as “loving kindness meditation”
- They also took part in pair work aimed at “mindful listening”, in which each person had to pay particular attention to another’s descriptions of emotional situations
Mindfulness comes with many potential benefits – but for the independent-minded, a selfishness boost could be an unexpected side-effect
To see whether this would influence the effects of mindfulness in the West, Poulin invited 366 college students into the lab and first gave them a questionnaire measuring their independence or interdependence.
- Half were then asked to perform a meditation focused on the sensation of breathing, and half were given a sham meditation that involved sitting and letting their mind wander for 15 minutes.
The experiment
Students were told about a new project to help fund a charity for the homeless.