Author: Iwamoto SK1,2, Alexander M3, Torres M3, Irwin MR4, Christakis NA3,5, Nishi A6
Affiliation: <sup>1</sup>College of Letters & Sciences, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720, United States.
<sup>2</sup>Los Angeles Center for Enriched Studies, Los Angeles, CA, 90035, United States.
<sup>3</sup>Human Nature Lab, Yale Institute for Network Science, Yale University, New Haven, CT, 06514, United States.
<sup>4</sup>Mindful Awareness Research Center and Cousins Center for Psychoneuroimmunology, Jane and Terry Semel Institute for Neuroscience at UCLA, and Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States.
<sup>5</sup>Departments of Sociology, Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Medicine, Statistics and Data Science, and Biomedical Engineering, Yale Institute for Network Science, P.O. Box 208263, New Haven, CT, 06520-8263, United States.
<sup>6</sup>Department of Epidemiology, UCLA Fielding School of Public Health, Los Angeles, CA, 90095, United States. akihironishi@ucla.edu.
Conference/Journal: Sci Rep.
Date published: 2020 Apr 16
Other:
Volume ID: 10 , Issue ID: 1 , Pages: 6511 , Special Notes: doi: 10.1038/s41598-020-62652-1. , Word Count: 198
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.
PMID: 32300129 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-020-62652-1