According
to popular belief, the ancient practice of meditation makes us all happier,
shinier, more compassionate human beings. Most of those things might be true –
except the compassionate part, suggests new research.
"So... I'm driving, feeling really
good about myself, and just like – just so much better than everyone else that's so mad.
And that's what meditation's for, is to feel superior to others."
This is the set-up of a joke by one of
my favorite stand-up comedians, the hilariously neurotic Jen Kirkman. After meditating for a whole 5
minutes one morning, Jen gets all contemplative in front of a green light,
stops the car, and annoys the hell out of every driver behind her who's trying
to get to work.
One driver starts yelling at her and
calling her names, she lies and says her mother had just died, the whole thing
escalates into a hilarious episode of road rage, which culminates with her
standing in her seat, poking her head through the sunroof of her car and
shouting at the guy: "I'm not crazy!!! I meditated, you... [insert
profanity here]!!!"
"I didn't say I was a good person,
I just said I meditated," Jen tells the audience, reminding us that the
two are often mistakenly conflated. As her anecdote illustrates, meditation
doesn't always make you a better person – in fact, according to a new study,
it almost never does.
An international team of researchers
examined 20 existing studies for evidence that mindfulness and loving-kindness
meditation promote less aggression, more kindness, and more pro-social
behavior. Contrary to the researchers' expectations, they didn't find any.
Meditation research is biased, study finds
Meditation practices, even devoid of
the religious connotations, still "seem to offer the hope of a better self
and a better world to many," says a co-author of the new study, Dr. Miguel
Farias, from the Centre for Advances in Behavioural Science at Coventry
University in the United Kingdom.
But, he continues, "Despite the
high hopes of practitioners and past studies, our research found that
methodological shortcomings greatly influenced the results we found."
Specifically, it turned out that the
studies that reported a rise in levels of compassion among meditators were
authored by the very same meditation teacher! "This reveals that the
researchers might have unintentionally biased their results," says Dr.
Farias.
"Most of the initial positive
results disappeared when the meditation groups were compared to other groups that
engaged in tasks unrelated to meditation," the co-author adds.
So what does this mean? Should we
discredit meditation altogether? Not at all, the researchers say.
"None of this, of course, invalidates
Buddhism or other religions' claims about the moral value and eventually
life-changing potential of its beliefs and practices. But our research findings
are a far cry from many popular claims made by meditators and some
psychologists."
Dr.
Miguel Farias
No comments:
Post a Comment