Spreading positive change: Societal benefits of meditation.

Meditation training produces beneficial effects on health, cognition, emotion, and social behavior. Sociologists have shown that individual-level traits and outcomes can spread through social networks across three or more degrees of connection. This article proposes that meditation-induced changes may similarly propagate through practitioners' social networks by positively influencing others via prosocial actions, improved cognitive functioning, and increased positive affect. Positive affective states and their physiological correlates may also be shared directly. The authors argue that such spreading could form the basis for collective responses to societal challenges and call for future research to examine this phenomenon.

Study at a glance

Abstract

Research over the past decades has revealed a variety of beneficial effects of meditation training. These beneficial effects span the levels of health and well-being, cognition, emotion, and social behavior. Around the same time, sociologists have shown that traits and outcomes on the individual level have the potential to spread in communities over three or more degrees. This means, for example, that changes can spread from one person to the next, and on to yet another person. Here, we propose that meditation-induced changes may likewise spread through the social networks of meditation practitioners. Such spreading may happen by positively influencing others through prosocial actions, improved cognitive functioning, and increased positive affect. Positive affective states and their underlying physiological correlates may also be shared in the literal sense. We argue that the spreading of positive meditation effects could provide the basis for collective responses to some of the urgent challenges we face in our current time and society and call for future meditation research to examine the phenomenon.