🤝 The Surprising Power of Social Mindfulness
Simple practices that boost our collective well-being
Altruism refers to actions that help others but come with a personal cost, and it has received a lot of attention from researchers. But most of our daily social behaviors are more subtle than that. Usually, if we’re trying to be friendly or generous, we’ll help people with smaller actions that are considerate of their feelings but don’t necessarily require a major investment.
When we hold a door open for someone, give directions to a tourist, or leave the last slice of pizza to a friend, we’re engaging in social mindfulness. It might not be as dramatic as altruism, but as the evidence below shows, it predicts important social and economic outcomes around the world.
🌎 Social mindfulness around the world
Just last week, more than 60 scientists published a collaborative research paper in the journal PNAS. The purpose was to compare levels of social mindfulness in 31 different countries with a total sample of over 10,000 people.
To measure social mindfulness, the researchers used an experiment that presented people with an array of items containing two or three identical objects and one unique object (e.g. one yellow baseball cap among three blue baseball caps). Participants were asked to select their favorite object from each array but were told to imagine that another person would have to choose an object from whatever was left over.
The task replicates a social conundrum we’ve all faced at some point. Do I take the last chocolate cookie or settle for one of the many apples so that someone else can have the cookie? Should I take the last cup of coffee or leave it for the next person?
In these situations, the most socially mindful action is to take one of the more plentiful objects so that the next person still has an opportunity to choose the limited item if they really want it. By repeating this scenario many times with different objects, the researchers could calculate the percentage of socially mindful choices for each person in their study. And by calculating the overall percentage for each country, they produced a social mindfulness score for every nation in their sample.
So which countries came out on top in social mindfulness? I created the graph below using data from the original paper. It shows a selection of their 31 countries ranked according to social mindfulness scores (I’ve chosen countries somewhat randomly from the full range of scores, but if you want to see the entire list of countries, you can find it in the original paper).
The most interesting question is whether this social mindfulness ranking is meaningful in some way. The researchers found that countries with higher social mindfulness had greater economic prosperity (as measured by GDP per capita), less income inequality (as measured by the Gini coefficient), and stronger environmental protection policies (as measured by the Environmental Performance Index).
The environmental protection scores were the best predictor of social mindfulness overall. Social mindfulness doesn’t only express itself in our daily interactions with each other, but also in national policies and economic indicators. When you need collective action toward a broad societal goal such as environmental sustainability, neighborly love comes in handy.
🧬 Loving-kindness meditation and telomeres
It’s not yet clear whether improving social mindfulness would actually boost support for environmental policy. The evidence above merely shows some association between them. But there are some other socio-emotional exercises that translate into quality of life benefits.
Loving-kindness meditation is an exercise that helps you practice feelings of compassion toward yourself and others. The exercise generally involves bringing to mind various people in your life and exploring your emotional reactions to them. By directing loving phrases and feelings toward them in your own mind, you expand your level of compassion for them. With regular practice, the idea is that you feel less distressed by antagonistic social experiences and more open to harmonious experiences.
In 2019, a group of US researchers tested whether this type of meditation would affect biological aging among 176 participants. Most meditation studies rely on subjective measures of emotional progress, but this study used the objective metric of telomere length. Telomeres are repetitive sequences of DNA at the end of your chromosomes that protect your chromosomes from instability. As you age and your cells divide, telomeres generally get shorter.
The meditation study found that 6 weeks of loving-kindness meditation slowed down telomere attrition in comparison to doing no meditation. Another meditation technique—specifically mindfulness meditation—produced an intermediate but inconclusive result, differing neither from the no-meditation control group nor the loving-kindness group.
At least in the context of telomere changes measured over a few months, loving-kindness meditation appears to be a useful practice. By expanding your feelings of compassion and connection to other people, you can positively impact your own bodily reactions.
⭐️ Takeaway tips
Practice loving-kindness meditation: Like most types of meditation, it takes time and commitment to develop your loving-kindness ability. If you’re interested, there are plenty of great resources you can read online to learn the traditional approaches (e.g. this article from the Greater Good Science Center at Berkeley). Many meditation apps also feature some form of loving-kindness meditation and can help you develop a good habit.
Experiment with your feelings of love vs dislike: If you don’t want to meditate regularly, you can instead try some brief exercises right now. For example, think about someone you don’t like very much (not someone you hate just yet). Can you close your eyes and contort your mind in such a way that you feel some genuine experience of love toward them? If you can pull this off, you may notice an interesting experience of relief or freedom. Negative social emotions like anger and hatred can be very consuming, so it’s freeing to learn that you can adjust your mental image of people to attract more pleasant emotions.
Choose the more plentiful option: If you’re interested in raising your social mindfulness score, you can always leave that last cookie or pizza slice for the person behind you during your next social occasion.
💡 A final quote
“Kindness is the only service that will stand the storm of life and not wash out. It will wear well and will be remembered long after the prism of politeness or the complexion of courtesy has faded away.”
~ Abraham Lincoln
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📬 I love to hear from readers. Reach out any time with comments or questions.
👋 Until next time,
Erman Misirlisoy, PhD