Full article title:

> Mindfulness meditation can increase selfishness and reduce generosity among those with independent self-construals

This is one of those cases where the trimmed Hacker News title loses an important bit of context: "among those with independent self-construals"

I also think prepending the word "western" or "US" to the title would give a bit more context as to what this study is actually looking at. It's not necessarily looking at mindfulness as taught by the Buddhist tradition, for example, but more at the US/western-centric, commoditised version of mindfulness, which in fairness, is called out in the article and the study, but could be overlooked if just going by the title alone.

From the study's intro:

> Mindfulness is big business. The U.S. meditation market, which includes classes, studios,and apps, is predicted to grow to over $2 billion by 2022.

> We propose that understanding the complex effects of mindfulness on prosocial behavior requires a recognition that mindfulness originated in societies that were highly interdependent in self-construal, but mindfulness in the West, including the U.S., is practiced in a context of predominantly independent self-construals (Markus & Kitayama, 1991).

So we're specifically talking about US, or more broadly, "western", versions of mindfulness practice here.

The title is also negatively skewed, but the overall outcome of the study (from their paper) is actually that mindfulness is likely to be neutral, and simply magnifies what's already there:

> Our findings suggest that mindfulness on its own is not prosocial—or antisocial.

Any form of "technology" (if we use that word in a very board sense) usually has the capability to magnify existing traits and behaviours. Whether social media, meditation or mindfulness, "technology" itself isn't necessarily inherently good or bad.

For example, social media often magnifies some of the worst parts of human psychology and behaviour. It doesn't really _cause_ that behaviour - it just brings it out of us. We have to be very intentional (and mindful) to ensure that we don't just default to our normal "look for the bad, look for the danger" instincts, which is what evolution has hammered into us for survival.

So, with regards to mindfulness and meditation - you can _choose_ to use it to expand your compassion and generosity towards others—and many mindfulness practices have this approach built right in to them—or you can use it to focus more inwardly and (I'm sure) become more selfish. Or you can not choose anything intentional at all, and just let it take you in whatever default direction you may already be drifting in. Letting it amplify whatever personal or cultural default norms/traits that you already tend towards. (And the cultural norms/traits of the study participants in this case are those of US university students).

While the study described in the article looks perfectly valid, and is interesting, I wouldn't want mindfulness in general to be overly tainted as "possibly harmful". It's still one of the more positive behaviours, by far, that one could engage themselves in. Even the bastardised US/western versions. And I count myself as a practitioner of "bastardised western mindfulness". It's all relative.

There is something interesting in the findings that may also be worth looking at more closely; When "priming" the participants with a more inward or outward focus, the increase in positive effects for the positively primed group was more pronounced than the increase in negative (more selfish) effects for the negative primed group.

So in other words, when using mindfulness to magnify the effect of an existing state (positive or negative), positive traits were magnified to a greater degree than negative traits were. I find this interesting. While the paper summarises that mindfulness is not inherently prosocial or antisocial, you could also interpret from these results that mindfulness does actually have a slightly prosocial/positive bias - in that it's more likely to bring out and magnify positive traits like compassion and generosity than it is to magnify negative traits like selfishness and greed. So it may be showing that the net effect of mindfulness may still be positive, and not necessarily (as they say) neutral.

For the "envelope stuffing" part of this study, I'd also be interested in whether there was a general effect on willpower and self-regulation between the two study groups that may have affected their ability to persist at the envelope stuffing task. Given that willpower and self-regulation are inherently self-directed (we can regulate only ourselves and not others) does being more focussed on the self during a period of mindfulness lead to a slightly higher depletion of willpower and self-regulation ability?