Such a useful activity naturally finds a variety of applications. Meditation techniques have been deployed in the military with the aim of increasing the wellbeing and work effectiveness of soldiers. Snipers are known to meditate in order to disengage emotionally from the act of killing, to steady the hand that takes a life (the element of peacefulness associated with meditation having been rather set aside). Corporations counteract stress and burnout with meditation which, on the surface, is an amiable aim, but it can also help create compliant workers. And in schools, meditation interventions aim to calm children’s minds, offering students the ability to better deal with the pressure of attaining high grades. Here, too, the goal is to reduce misbehaviour and aggression in a bid to increase prosociality and compliance. [...]
Initially, the results were promising. Our meta-analysis indicated that meditation did indeed have a positive, though moderate, impact on prosociality. But digging deeper, the picture became more complicated. While meditation made people feel somewhat more compassionate or empathetic, it did not reduce aggression or prejudice, nor did it improve how socially connected one felt. So the prosocial benefits are not straightforward, but they are apparently measurable. The issue is the way in which those benefits were measured. [...]
Confirmation bias is difficult to overcome. Journals rely on reviewers to spot them, but because some of these biases have become standard practice (through the reporting of marginally significant effects, say) they often slip through. Reviewers and authors also face academic pressures that make these biases more likely since journals favour the reporting of positive results. But in the study of meditation there is another complication: many of the researchers, and therefore the reviewers of journal articles, are personally invested in meditation not only as practitioners and enthusiasts but also as providers of meditation programmes from which their institutions or themselves financially profit. The overly positive view of meditation and the fierce fight to protect its untarnished reputation make it harder to publish negative results.
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