Ever since I was introduced to mindfulness, I have contemplated the image of the monk spending his days meditating in a cave deep in the foothills of the Himalayas.
It seems like enlightenment might be slightly more attainable without the daily annoyances of traffic, parking tickets, taxes, and endless commercials. For most of us, however, the realities of living in a society will naturally disrupt our peace and our responsibilities come with real burdens. Thus, mindfulness and other contemplative practices must exist within the context of others—of a society.
However, the way mindfulness is taught and described today often seems to reinforce an individualistic and secular conception of contemplative practices. This makes sense when clinicians like me hope to empower the individual to see the profound agency in their lives to make healthier choices. If you want to control anxiety, it might be easier to teach an individual to practice mindfulness to promote adaptive responding, rather than try to control the endless variables that can cause anxious spiraling or hope for some far-off social transformation that will make inner peace inevitable. But is the point of mindfulness and other contemplative practices (as we teach them in medicine) really to benefit yourself only?
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This question has ignited healthy debate across various disciplines. Even within psychology, the way we study and measure mindfulness tends to reduce it down to facets such as observing, describing, acting with awareness, non-judging and a non-reactivity of one’s own experiences. Notably, the five most popular mindfulness scales don’t exactly include compassion or other-orientation as a facet. But if mindfulness in the scientific-medical context is derived from the Buddhist philosophies, how did the scientists so clearly miss the relational aspects of mindfulness?
For instance, does it matter if an individual practices mindfulness but is a racist, xenophobe, or sexist? Is it possible to have a mindful society that hates its neighbors, chooses war over peace, and division over unity? The science of contemplative research has recently turned more toward exploring these kinds of questions about the relational aspects of mindfulness and other contemplative practices. The timing couldn’t be more important as society feels the intense burden of social division and an undeniable rise of authoritarianism.
Previous studies have shown that those who score high in social dominance orientation also have favorable views towards authoritarianism, sexism, racism, and xenophobia—to name a few—and less favorable views of traits like empathy. Indeed, empathy is an increasingly important societal topic and has even entered mainstream political discourse. For example, Charlie Kirk, an American conservative figure, once famously argued that “empathy is a made-up, New Age term that does a lot of damage.”
What is the relationship between these practices, traits, and orientations? Previous studies have routinely found that mindfulness and self-compassion appeared to be positively related to empathy. It seems intuitive that these intrapersonal practices could broaden to interpersonal attitudes. Could contemplative practices such as mindfulness or self-compassion not only affect empathy, but also broader social orientations?
This question motivated our latest study recently released in the journal of Mindfulness. Along with my talented collaborator Polina Beloboradova from the Virginia Commonwealth University, our exploratory study aimed to understand whether individualistic contemplative practices such as self-compassion were related to interpersonal or broader social attitudes, such as empathy and egalitarianism, or its opposite, authoritarianism.
Empathy and social dominance
Our exploratory study gathered two large groups of participants and asked them questions related to self-compassion, empathy, and a construct known as social dominance orientation, which measures the generalized belief that people are either equal or that some groups are inherently more dominant.
We understood the critical shortcomings of only studying mindfulness for its relational aspects, so we focused on self-compassion as a trait, which has only recently become a fascinating subject of psychology. More than “self-love,” self-compassion considers the relationship toward oneself. It includes aspects of mindfulness and self-kindness, as well as common humanity: the belief that experiencing suffering is normal in the human condition.
We used a statistical method known as network analysis. Think of a map that shows how major airports connect to smaller airports and how disruptions in one airport might affect the network of connections. The study grouped and visualized the variables based on the strengths of those associations. By doing so, we were able to reveal the complex network of influence of these variables. We ran the analysis across two samples, one before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the other after. We leveraged the once-in-a-lifetime unplanned timing of the pandemic to investigate whether the profound social disruption of COVID affected social beliefs. A strong body of evidence supports how threats and societal distress tends to negatively affect social attitudes.
Despite the differences of social contexts, our results indicated the same pattern where self-compassion was related to social dominance orientation, but only through empathy. Of the two components of empathy we studied, emotional concern appeared to have a stronger relationship to social dominance orientation than the cognitive component. The amount of emotional concern was a stronger predictor of how you perceive and care about other groups of people. The study found that higher levels of self-compassion and empathy predicted lower levels of authoritarianism, whereas low self-compassion and empathy predicted higher levels of authoritarianism.
Compassion and egalitarianism
These novel findings give theoretical support to how intrapersonal traits such as self-compassion are linked to broader social attitudes through empathy. Simply said, there is some relationship between the amount of self-compassion, empathy, and egalitarianism or belief that people are deserving of equality. Importantly, the study was unable to determine the direction of these influences, so it would be premature to claim that self-compassion definitively affects authoritarianism through empathy.
Our hope is that these insights inspire other researchers to test whether self-compassion interventions, such as the Mindful Self-Compassion program which teaches individuals to develop their capacity for self-compassion over an eight-week course, could be a fundamental aspect of social-emotional learning that could make individuals more tolerant to all groups of people. Researchers could examine whether self-compassion interventions incidentally affect empathy and egalitarian views over the course by including these measures before, during, and following the intervention.
The potential impact of those follow-up studies could be profound. If self-compassion could be improved as a core element of therapy or social-emotional learning in schools, not only would the individual have increased self-compassion, which would mitigate the risk of some mental health challenges and promote well-being, but they might also develop greater empathy and egalitarian beliefs, effectively widening their aperture of concern for others.
By shifting toward a perspective that other people from different backgrounds are worthy of similar compassion and empathy as ourselves, we might be able to effectively address many of society’s ills such as racism, sexism, xenophobia, and the multiple forms of social division. As such, self-compassion as a focus may hold promise for fields like clinical and social psychology that support human flourishing across individual, interpersonal, and societal levels.
The Dalai Lama may have well understood this when he said in The Book of Joy, “It is clear that the only way to truly change our world is through teaching compassion. Our society is lacking an adequate sense of compassion, sense of kindness, and genuine regard for others’ well-being. So now many, many, people who seriously think about humanity all have the same view. We must promote basic human values, the inner values that lie at the heart of who we are as humans.”
This idea just might be something to sit with…not necessarily in a cave.
