Watching the experience of free will dissolve: The influence of intensive meditation on belief in free will.
Kiana Marie Sabugo, James Elliott, Jonathan W. Schooler, Elliott Daniel Ihm, John Protzko, Benjamin Baird, Madeleine E. Gross
PsyArXiv October 18, 2024 preprint DOI: 10.31234/osf.io/wx3fy (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Quasi-experimental study |
|---|---|
| Population | Meditation retreat participants and a podcast comparison group |
| Intervention | Intensive meditation retreat |
| Duration | 8-week intensive meditation retreat, measured at beginning and end |
| Measures | Free Will subscale of the Free Will Inventory |
| Topics | Meditation |
| Key findings | Free will belief decreased over an 8-week intensive meditation retreat but remained unchanged in a podcast comparison group given the same instructional content. Greater self-reported years of meditation were also associated with lower free will belief at the outset. The authors suggest intensive meditation may lower belief in free will, possibly via changes in the phenomenology of thought and perception of self. |
Abstract
While meditation research has primarily focused on mental health outcomes and immediate cognitive and affective benefits, little is known about its influence on higher-order beliefs, such as views on free will and personal agency. Despite substantial references to free will and related concepts in Buddhist philosophy, to our knowledge, there has been no empirical work investigating the relationship between intensive meditation experience and belief in free will. The current study used a quasi-experimental approach to examine the influence of an 8-week intensive meditation retreat and a podcast comparison group on free will belief (FWB; as measured using the Free Will subscale of the Free Will Inventory). FWB was measured both at the beginning and end of the retreat. First, greater experience in meditation (measured in self-reported years meditating) was negatively correlated with belief in free will at the outset, suggesting that individuals with more meditation experience tended to have lower belief in free will. Next, changes in FWB were compared between the retreat group and the podcast comparison group who had access to the same instructional content via audio recordings. Overall, there was a decrease in free will belief for the retreat group, but free will belief for the podcast comparison group remained the same. Thus, the current study provides evidence that intensive meditation is associated with lower beliefs in free will, possibly driven by the influence of meditation on phenomenology of thought and changes in perception of the self. Furthermore, the current results suggest that measuring higher-order beliefs may be especially relevant when assessing mindfulness and meditation practices in applied settings.
Comparable studies
Other experimental studies on meditation, most cited first.
| Study | Year | Design | Participants |
|---|---|---|---|
| The benefits of being present: Mindfulness and its role in psychological well-being. Cancer patients (clinical intervention study) | 2003 | Mixed methods: scale development, correlational, quasi-experimental, laboratory, experience-sampling, and clinical intervention study | |
| Loving-kindness meditation increases social connectedness. | 2008 | Controlled laboratory experiment | |
| Mindfulness and mind-wandering: Finding convergence through opposing constructs. | 2012 | Two studies: correlational study and experimental study | |
| Mental Training Enhances Attentional Stability: Neural and Behavioral Evidence | 2009 | Experimental study | |
| Mindfulness meditation and substance use in an incarcerated population. Incarcerated population | 2006 | Quasi-experimental with treatment-as-usual control condition |