When it really counts: Investigating the relation between trait mindfulness and actual prosocial behavior

Abstract

Meta-analytical findings suggested a positive link between trait mindfulness and prosociality. However, most correlational studies on mindfulness and prosociality have relied on self-report measures. The present work aimed to address this serious limitation by investigating actual prosocial behavior. We further focused on mindfulness as a multi-dimensional personality trait to disentangle effects of different mindfulness aspects. In addition, we tested whether the relation between trait mindfulness and prosocial behavior emerges under a theoretical meaningful experimental boundary condition (i.e., feelings of guilt). In two studies (using four different samples; N = 1240), we did not find support for a positive link between trait mindfulness and (a) charitable donation and (b) behavior in an incentivized economic game, respectively. Evidence for manipulated guilt-level as a moderator was inconclusive. Taken together, the findings point to a more complex role of trait mindfulness for prosocial behavior. Limitations and ideas for further research are discussed.

The relation of mindfulness and prosocial behavior: What do we (not) know?

“…Noticeably, the effects sizes distributed across a wide spectrum, ranging from less than zero to about d = 1.60, twice the size of a conventionally large effect [24]. When focusing on observer-reported (instead of self-reported) prosocial behaviors, the association was considerably weaker, d = 0.37, 95% CI [0.19, 0.79] (see also [25]).…”

“…For this latter type of prosocial behavior, Berry et al [22**] found no reliable meta-analytic effect of mindfulness interventions. The question thus remains, whether increased mindfulness increases costly prosocial behavior (see [25]).…”

The impact of mindfulness meditation on social and moral behavior: Does mindfulness enhance other-oriented motivation or decrease monetary reward salience?

“…Furthermore, other studies found evidence of a negative impact of mindfulness on prosociality (Chen and Jordan, 2020;Guo et al, 2021;Hafenbrack et al, 2021;Poulin et al, 2021). Crucially, the inconsistency of the meta-analytical evidence on MM and prosocial behavior might be due to methodological issues and biases (e.g., employment of selfreport instead of behavioral measures and use of correlational instead of longitudinal studies) (Schindler and Pfattheicher, 2021;Schindler and Friese, 2022).…”

“…In mindfulness research, prosocial behavior has often been operationalized as helping behavior (Leiberg et al, 2011;Condon et al, 2013;Lim et al, 2015), altruistic redistribution of funds (Weng et al, 2013(Weng et al, , 2015, financial allocation (Hafenbrack et al, 2020), reparative behavior (Hafenbrack et al, 2021), or monetary donation (Ashar et al, 2016;Chen and Jordan, 2020;Iwamoto et al, 2020;Schindler and Pfattheicher, 2021).…”

The Role of Just World Beliefs in Responding to the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…More importantly, because we aimed at assessing people's general way of acting during the COVID-19 pandemic in terms of social distancing, the scale concerning concrete social distancing was too specific and too context-dependent for measuring these traits; for instance, by presuming the weather to be good the next few days when the study was conducted over several weeks. Hence, the scale rather measured people's momentary behavior, or more specifically their momentary behavioral intentions, which however have been shown to vary widely and to not correspond to people's average behavior (Fleeson, 2004;Schindler & Pfattheicher, 2021). Retrospectively, it would have been a better choice to employ a different scale targeting people's typical behavior─not susceptible to situational factors─which is the reason why we relocated the according results to the Supplemental Material.…”