Compassion meditators show less anger, less punishment, and more compensation of victims in response to fairness violations.

ABSTRACT: Fairness violations elicit powerful behavioral and affective responses. Indeed, people are willing to incur costs to sanction unfair behavior. Here we study the possible impact of long-term mental training in socio-affective capacities such as compassion on altruistic punishment and compensatory behavior in economic games. To this end we recruited a group of long-term meditation practitioners (LTPs) who had engaged in an average of 40 K h of mental training exercises including compassion-related meditation, along with a group of meditation-naïve controls. Participants played several adaptations of the dictator game in which they had the opportunity to punish the dictator both when they were the recipients of the dictator's offer and when they were third-party witnesses to the dictator's tr

SUBMITTER: McCall C 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC4260514 | biostudies-literature | 2014

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature