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Ethics and Meditation: A New Educational Combination to Boost Verbal Creativity and Sense of Responsibility.

Hélène Hagège, Mohammed El Ourmi, Rebecca Shankland, France Arboix-Calas, Christophe Leys, Todd Lubart

Journal of Intelligence August 7, 2023 DOI: 10.3390/jintelligence11080155 (opens in new tab)

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Study at a glance

AI-extracted from the abstract
Characteristics Nonrandomized trial with active control group Peer reviewed
Sample size 84
Population Second-year science university students
Intervention Meditation-Based Ethics of Responsibility (MBER) program
Topics Meditation
Keywords Creativity Education Ethics Quasi-experimental study Responsibility Soft skills
Key findings The MBER program showed a large effect on participants' sense of their own responsibility and on convergent and divergent creative writing tasks, in both conceptual-semantic and engineering-like verbal ideation. Convergent conceptual-semantic thinking may moderate the program's effect on awareness and sense of responsibility.

Abstract

Both creativity and responsibility are important higher-order skills to develop to meet the challenges of the Anthropocene, and both are related to attentional states of consciousness and to ethics. Meditation is a set of practices that trains attentional and emotional regulation. A few studies have shown that different kinds of meditation can foster different kinds of creative thinking, and others have begun to investigate the effect of the combination of meditation and ethics on ethical characteristics (but not yet on creativity or precisely on responsibility, so far). Here, we present a nonrandomized trial with an active control group among second-year science university students (n = 84) to test the effect of the secular Meditation-Based Ethics of Responsibility (MBER) program on creative potential, self-reported awareness, and sense of one's own responsibility. The results show a large effect of the program on sense of one's own responsibility and convergent and divergent creative writing tasks, both in conceptual-semantic and engineering-like verbal ideation. They also suggest that convergent conceptual-semantic thinking might moderate the effect of the MBER program on the awareness and sense of one's own responsibility. This work opens up new research and educational perspectives linked to necessary behavioral changes in the Anthropocene.

Comparable studies

Other non-randomized and open-label trials on meditation, most cited first.

Study Year Design Participants
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction in Relation to Quality of Life, Mood, Symptoms of Stress, and Immune Parameters in Breast and Prostate Cancer Outpatients Early-stage breast and prostate cancer patients 2003 Pre-post intervention study n = 59
Exploring self‐compassion and empathy in the context of mindfulness‐based stress reduction (MBSR) Community sample 2010 Pre-post intervention study
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction Lowers Psychological Distress In Medical Students Second-year medical students 2003 Prospective nonrandomized cohort-controlled study n = 302
Intensive meditation training, immune cell telomerase activity, and psychological mediators. Retreat participants and matched controls 2011 Controlled trial with wait-list control group n = 60
The Effectiveness of Mindfulness Training for Children with ADHD and Mindful Parenting for their Parents Children aged 8-12 with ADHD and their parents 2011 Within-group waitlist controlled trial n = 22

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Meditation Philosophy of mind