Mindfulness boosts generosity only for group-oriented individuals

New research suggests that being a mindful person doesn’t automatically mean being a more helpful one. A study published in Mindfulness found that people who scored high on trait mindfulness — a natural tendency to be present and nonjudgmental in daily life — were more likely to help others only if they saw themselves as connected to others. On the other hand, mindful people who viewed themselves as more independent were no more helpful, and sometimes even less so. These findings highlight the importance of social identity in shaping how mindfulness influences our behavior toward others.

Mindfulness has long been associated with benefits for personal well-being, like reducing anxiety and improving self-awareness. But whether it leads people to behave more kindly or generously has been harder to pin down. Some studies suggest mindfulness boosts empathy and cooperation. Others find little to no effect, or even that mindfulness can make people more self-focused. This inconsistency led the researchers to suspect that the social context in which mindfulness operates might play a key role — especially how people see themselves in relation to others.

“I was a religious studies major in college, and I was always interested in the idea that certain religious practices seemed to reflect and/or mesh with broader cultural trends,” said study author Michael Poulin, an associate professor of psychology at the University at Buffalo and director of the Stress, Coping, and Prosocial Engagement Lab.

“I recalled reading an argument that Buddhism (from which mindfulness grew) flourished in East Asia in part because those societies already emphasized the idea of quieting the self in order to promote group harmony. When that came to mind more recently, I found myself wondering if there were certain tensions between mindfulness (originally a Buddhist practice) and Western society, in which the self is so dominant.”

The researchers were especially interested in something called “self-construal,” or how people define themselves. Do they see themselves as part of a group, or as individuals? Do they value equality and harmony, or hierarchy and competition? Past studies showed that people with a more interdependent sense of self — those who view themselves as connected to others — were more likely to act kindly after mindfulness training. Those with an independent self-construal — who value uniqueness and autonomy — were sometimes less helpful.

This study asked whether those same patterns would appear with trait mindfulness — a stable tendency to be mindful — rather than just momentary mindfulness from a brief meditation. The researchers also wanted to dig deeper into the types of independence and interdependence that might shape the effects of mindfulness.

Some people might see themselves as part of a group that values equality (horizontal interdependence), while others belong to groups that value hierarchy and authority (vertical interdependence). On the independent side, some might see everyone as equals doing their own thing (horizontal individualism), while others strive to compete and rise above the rest (vertical individualism).

To test these ideas, the researchers recruited 149 undergraduate students from a large university in the United States. Before coming to the lab, each participant completed a battery of questionnaires. These assessed their levels of trait mindfulness, how interdependent or independent they were, and whether they leaned more toward horizontal or vertical forms of these social views.

When participants arrived at the lab, they were told the study was about “meditation and the self.” They read a newspaper article about a local charity that helps poor and homeless individuals in the area. Afterward, they were asked a few questions and told the study was complete — but since they still had time left in the session, the experimenter offered them the chance to help the charity by stuffing envelopes with flyers. The number of envelopes each person stuffed was used as the measure of prosocial behavior.

The researchers found that mindfulness did not have the same effect for everyone. People who scored high on collective interdependence — those who felt closely connected to groups they belonged to — became significantly more helpful as mindfulness increased. On average, they stuffed about nine more envelopes for each increase in mindfulness. But those who scored low on this collective identity actually helped less the more mindful they were.

A similar pattern emerged for independence. People low in both horizontal and vertical individualism — those who didn’t strongly identify as self-reliant or competitive — showed more helping behavior as their mindfulness increased. But for people who strongly identified as independent or competitive, mindfulness didn’t boost helping, and in some cases was linked to doing less.

The researchers used a statistical technique called zero-inflated Poisson regression to account for the fact that many people stuffed zero envelopes and that helping varied widely across the group. After accounting for multiple comparisons using a correction method, they found that three factors consistently shaped the relationship between mindfulness and helping: collective self-construal, horizontal individualism, and vertical individualism. Vertical collectivism showed a weaker influence that disappeared when other factors were considered together.

“We measured people’s tendency to feel connected to others in several different ways, and we were a little surprised in the most recent study about which of the specific measures we used seemed to be the most important,” Poulin told PsyPost. “For example, we measured both individualism (the tendency to prioritize the self and one’s own goals) and collectivism (the tendency to prioritize one’s group and collective goals). These sound like they should be complete opposites, but they are not necessarily—one can be high or low in both, for example.

“Between these different measures, being high or low in individualism seemed to be more important than being high or low in collectivism. This was not something we expected, though it also is not against our predictions at all.”

These findings suggest that trait mindfulness tends to amplify people’s existing social orientations. If someone already values their group and sees themselves as connected to others, mindfulness may strengthen that sense of connection and encourage helpful action. But for people who identify strongly as independent or competitive, mindfulness might simply reinforce those views — leading them to prioritize their own goals or avoid actions that benefit others at a cost to themselves.

The researchers noted that mindfulness, in and of itself, is not inherently good or bad for social behavior. Instead, it may act like a mirror, reflecting and amplifying a person’s underlying social motivations. One possible reason is that mindfulness increases awareness of the self, including how a person fits into the social world. If a person’s identity includes a desire to help, mindfulness makes that clearer. But if their identity centers on standing apart or staying ahead, mindfulness might reinforce those goals instead.

“I think the key takeaway is that although mindfulness does a really good job of making people happier and less stressed, there is no guarantee that it will also make us morally better, especially if ‘better’ includes things like volunteering or giving to charity,” Poulin said. “The moral benefits of mindfulness seem to depend on whether people see themselves as highly connected to other people or not.”

However, the sample consisted of college students in the United States, who may not represent other populations. Western cultures tend to emphasize independence more than collectivism, so the effects might look different in other cultural settings.

“This was a sample of American college students, so we have to be careful in making generalizations,” Poulin noted. “These patterns could be different for older adults, for example, and we’d certainly expect that the results could be different in different cultures.”

The study also relied on observational data. Although the researchers found patterns consistent with past experiments, they did not manipulate mindfulness in this study, which limits conclusions about cause and effect.

“We only measured people’s descriptions of their own levels of mindfulness, so based on this study, it’s unclear whether it’s actually mindfulness affecting prosocial behavior or something else that’s associated with mindfulness,” Poulin said. “However, in a previous paper we did demonstrate similar effects with experimentally-manipulated levels of mindfulness, as well.”

Still, the findings offer new insight into when mindfulness may help us connect with others — and when it may not. The results suggest that organizations interested in promoting prosocial outcomes through mindfulness programs should consider the social orientation of their participants.

“I’m broadly interested in how people regulate emotions such as empathy or distress when they encounter others who are in need or suffering,” Poulin added. “Mindfulness is a very powerful emotion regulation strategy, and our findings suggest that different ways of regulating our emotions lead to different behavioral outcomes. I would like to learn more about exactly how that works!”

The study, “Trait Mindfulness and Prosocial Behavior: The Moderating Role of Self-Construals and Individualism,” was authored by Michael J. Poulin, Lauren M. Ministero, C. Dale Shaffer-Morrison, Kathleen Finnerty, Leslie Mei, Imokhuede Nathaniel Zedomi, and Shira Gabriel.