SIO330: Does Meditation Reduce Prosocial Behavior?

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:12 Thomas: Hello and welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 330. I'm Thomas. That's Dr. Lindsey Osterman. How are you doing, Lindsey?

0:00:19 Lindsey: Yeah, you know.

0:00:22 Thomas: It's true. We're still, it's still all Roe all the time for me. Like, I'm just, that's kind of what I'm thinking about all the time.

0:00:28 Lindsey: Yeah, I'm getting used to my wings. I hope that you don't notice an extra echo here. It's a little cavernous.

0:00:35 Lindsey: You know, that they wear on their heads, they call them wings. The handmaids.

0:00:29 Thomas: Um, they call those wings? Oh okay, sorry, I forgot about that. Couldn't remember the terminology I got, but you You know, I'd better get to, I better study it. I got to know it, you know? Yeah. I want to, so at the end of last episode, I had like the very spontaneous idea of people sharing their stories. And I just wanted to like put a finer point on that. I've gotten several but I should Clarify, I am envisioning people doing little interviews with people, and there's absolutely every chance to remain anonymous in that. Just want to throw that out there. And that in mind, if you're somebody who was considering sharing or emailing or whatever, that's gonna respond everybody, when can figure out what's gonna look like, when we could schedule and everything, but thanks for emailing, thanks for contacting me, really appreciate it, that's what I'm envisioning. And if that's something you don't want to do, not comfortable with, totally cool. So keep that in mind. I still very much want to do that project. But

0:00:39 Lindsey: Yeah. That's right. Oh, that's great.

0:01:31 Thomas: In the meantime, yeah, yeah. In the meantime, let's find out how these people who are ruining our lives are okay with it. No, not exactly related, though maybe. This was a shared in the group, a science thingy in need of a Lindsay -ing by Marcus and just right away the title. I already love it. Mindfulness reduces pro -social reparative behaviors by buffering people against feelings of guilt. I love this so much. I'm very curious about this. Honestly, this is something I think about even outside of the like mindfulness framing, just

0:01:32 Lindsey: Me too. I'm excited about that.

0:02:10 Lindsey: Yeah,

0:02:11 Thomas: In, in, know, therapy and stuff in general, I always wonder how much, what's a healthy level of beating yourself up. Cause I'm, I'm way over the line on that. Then every time I talk to people or therapists or anybody who's like, yeah, you need just like, you don't let go of all that. I'm like, but then won't I be an asshole? Like if I, if I'm just like I instantly, you know, uh, into somebody's car and I'm like, well, you know, I'm okay with myself, whatever, or something, you know, does it, does this reduce, and so I'm really curious to see uh this science thingy ended up tackling This, what it has to say about it, so there you go, let's get to it.

0:02:20 Lindsey: Me too.

0:02:44 Lindsey: Mm -hmm. I've had exactly that argument with my therapist before. It's uh, yeah.

0:02:51 Thomas: What?

0:02:51 Lindsey: But no, she's, she's good though, she's, she's been helping me to, to see that there are like different sort of mechanisms that can motivate pro-social behavior. It doesn't have to be, you know, calling yourself a piece of shit, so um. Yeah, I know, right, it's, it's, doesn't come naturally to me either. Hmm.

0:03:05 Thomas: Yeah. I remember with one therapist too, I talked about, like, I think I, I asked him something like this. I was like, well, I don't remember how it came up, but I do remember her saying, you, there's kind of two options. Like you can either be an asshole and not care. And then you're fine. Like her job was to just make it, it consistent, work out either way. It's like either, either be a asshole and you don't care about it and move on. And that's fine. Or, you know, be an and really care about it, but then you need to find a way to like, like, deal with that fact. You know, there's kind of two options. And I feel like it was sort of amoral of her in a way, which is maybe what, you know, it makes sense. Like her job is to treat a person and to make them be okay where they are. And I thought it was funny. That was like, well, one option is you could just be a psychopath and then you're totally fine. Like, do whatever and it's fine.

0:03:57 Lindsey: Your therapist sounds different from my therapist

0:03:59 Thomas: It wasn't in those exact words. That's my exaggerated telling of it. But sort of, like, it was sort of like, you know, here's your options. You can care less about this or you find a way to deal with that kind of thing.

0:03:59 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:04:12 Lindsey: No, okay, maybe we should get a study, but this is, this is fun, we should just continue this conversation at some point. Um, so I'm pretty sure that the interest in covering this paper

0:04:19 Thomas: I mean, I will note, I did leave this therapist because I wasn't entirely thrilled with how they were doing. So this is not an endorsement of whatever this therapist said.

0:04:20 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, I don't, I don't think I 100% agree with that approach, uh, make the point, I was gonna say, Bethany's thing is usually like to take away the the layer of shame on top of the guilt, like, or on top the negative emotional reaction, so like being able to sit with the negative reaction and understand it and expect, inspect it, but then like not judge yourself for having that reaction. And that's been very helpful to me, I think. And some of the stuff you're talking about, about like, you know, calling yourself an asshole, I think is, is more about that like second order reaction and taking that away, so I'm not a therapist

0:05:01 Thomas: Well, I'll have to do a few more sessions with you till I understand the distinction there, I think. But yeah, I'm sorry. I'll be and see you on the couch.

0:05:03 Lindsey: Yeah. Okay. Yeah, sounds good. Um, I think I'm pretty sure that because Marcus's post got quite a bit of interest generated there. And I think the interest in covering this paper was that people wanted to know if meditation was an integral part of how Sam Harris became a complete asshole. Probably not. But I do think that these authors are exploring a really interesting boundary condition of the benefits of mindfulness practice. And especially given that, you last several years have seen an explosion of interest in mindfulness as sort of like a fix for everything.

0:05:39 Thomas: Yeah. Specifically in like the tech community too. I know that the, I bet you, I, if I had to guess, and maybe, I don't know if they said the origins of this, but I have to guess one of the origins is, uh, the Dorsee, you know, like his whole thing was meditating and being completely fine with everything. And then people are like incredibly mad at every decision he's making. And it's like, but he's fine with it. Cause he's, you know, he's meditating, this is

0:06:01 Lindsey: I Yeah, I, they don't, I don't think that they referenced Jack Dorsey specifically, but they do talk a lot about its use in corporate culture. Agree. I think that this papers like this are a useful corrective to this kind of trend that we've seen over the last several years popularizing this. So, so this paper is entitled "Mindfulness Meditation Reduces Guilt and Pro-Social Reparation." And it was published by Andrew Haffenbrack, Matthew LaPalme, and Isabel Salal in 2021, last year, in one of the top social psych journals. So this is Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. JPSB is definitely a bragging rights kind of place to to get your study in?

0:06:38 Thomas: Not a pay -to-play penis hoax publication

0:06:41 Lindsey: No, no, it's not. No, it is an excellent journal. Their paper opens with a question that I remember to me repeatedly when I was a Sam Harris stan and getting really curious about his obsession with mindfulness. It sounds similar to the question that you just posed, which is whether the touted benefits of mindfulness might sometimes have negative interpersonal consequences. For context, there is a large body of research showing that mindfulness meditation is effective at dampening negative emotions. And it may do this through a variety of potential mechanisms. So it reduces mind wandering, it prevents rumination, it helps people recognize the temporary nature of emotional experiences, and helps people explicitly notice exactly what they're feeling, which is a legit very helpful thing to do. You know, there's... there's so much that most of us don't notice about our internal experiences as they're happening. And so directing attention toward them can actually in and of itself be very helpful in disrupting dysfunctional patterns of thought, right? Like that's part of the work that people do in like cognitive behavioral therapy, for instance.

0:06:42 Thomas: Okay yeah Yeah. Yeah.

0:07:42 Lindsey: Like, for instance, you know, I have a lot of social anxiety, I ruminate a lot about social interactions. And when I'm forced to identify the specific thought that's making me anxious, not all the time, but often I find that it really doesn't make any sense, which can be really helpful in letting it go. So it'll be like, I made a joke that was dumb about, and I'm worried that my friend's going to now think that I just really hate kittens and want them all to die or something stupid, even though everybody knows I love kittens. And so just

0:08:04 Thomas: You're like I made a big stink about the word invaginate and how it was meant something else, like, how does everybody feel about this, should I have just accepted it, no, I, I know, I know you, same way.

0:08:11 Lindsey: Actually, yes, I thought, yeah, I thought about using that as an example. It felt too, too raw.

0:08:21 Thomas: So I can, I could cut this if you want, but in that case, it does make sense because you're right. So you can ruminate on it and be like, but I'm right. So therefore everything's fine.

0:08:24 Lindsey: No, no, that's fine. Leave it in, leave it in. It's good. So yeah, my mother -in -law says that sometimes it's better better to be nice than right. And she's very wise. So you're

0:08:39 Thomas: Yeah, I, my standard feeling about life and humans is that everybody is just nicer than me and they don't, you know, like, they're just like, don't care about all these little and vaginate, you know, things that you and I care about, and they are a lot happier and people like them more. That's my standing, like,

0:08:56 Lindsey: Probably right. We got to stick together. So for things like that, when it really is kind of a ridiculous thing, you know, that as soon as you look at it, it falls apart, like just directing attention toward the thought and asking, okay, so does this person actually hate me now? Or do they actually think that I hate kittens or care too much about the word invaginate or whatever? Directing attention attention toward it is often enough to disrupt that ruminative cycle and the anxiety associated with it.

And so for those kinds of thought patterns, mindfulness meditation can be, you know, one of many useful tools for noticing that and changing those patterns. And furthermore, there's evidence that the effects of mindfulness do facilitate pro -social behavior under many circumstances. And it makes sense how this might be the case too, right? So for one, mindfulness practice can increase your ability to sustain and direct your attention. And And so if you're thinking in a social context, if you are better able to notice the needs of others in a social context because you practice being able to direct attention, you have more opportunities to be responsive to the needs

0:08:59 Thomas: Yeah. Hmm. Oh,

0:09:56 Lindsey: Others.

0:09:57 Thomas: I was thinking it could go the other way, too, where if you're like somebody who's like, I can't believe Lindsay's telling me that invaginate means something else, like come on, and then you examine it and you're, like wait, this is not reasonable, Lindsay's just just a smart person who actually knew what the word meant and I should you know is that part of it too that was that was a serious question embedded within the joke about the situation

0:10:14 Lindsey: It's entirely possible. Yeah, right. Okay. No, I think that's true, right? So if you re practicing mindfulness, it may help you to sort of catch Catch your own sort of patterns of thinking.

0:10:27 Thomas: Like sort through what yeah like why you're too upset about something maybe you

0:10:31 Lindsey: Right, right. Yeah. Trying to think of like how that would directly translate into pro -social behavior, but I could definitely see that being a mechanism for sure.

0:10:38 Thomas: Don't think just like you forgiving people and moving on would be pro-social behavior or or Can you define what we're talking about with when when you say pro-social behavior? Maybe I don't, precisely, you know, what kinds of things you're talking about.

0:10:42 Lindsey: Yeah, no, fair. That's fair in a lot of studies. They're looking specifically like helping behaviors that in this.

0:10:54 Thomas: Gotcha. Gotcha. Okay.

0:10:55 Lindsey: Yeah in the current study. They are looking at something slightly different, but in this past research a lot. Of it is yeah.

0:10:58 Thomas: So this was more like interpersonal stuff that I was talking about rather than like a, like helping behavior, I guess. Okay.

0:11:04 Lindsey: Yeah right you're talking about like relationship maintenance, then I could definitely see, yes, right, That being able to inspect your own processes is going to be helpful in maintaining relationships. Yeah, another mechanism that's been suggested in past literature is the fact that mindfulness can reduce negative emotions and increase positive ones. And that can facilitate pro-social behaviors in some contexts. So past research has demonstrated that at least under some circumstances, better mood can cause people to be more helpful, whereas the experience of certain negative mood states like stress and fear can can sometimes inhibit helpfulness, right? Having said all that, it doesn't seem perfectly clear to me, or or to these authors, that dampening and negative emotions is always a good thing, or that it always leads to desirable social behavior, because despite their unpleasantness, it is clear that guilt and anger and other negative emotions occupy a very, very functional place in our lives.

0:11:08 Thomas: Gotcha.

0:11:57 Thomas: Yes.

0:11:57 Lindsey: And they, they do motivate behaviors that are really important for relationship maintenance.

0:12:01 Thomas: I always just imagine like with the massive, for example, homelessness crisis, like every Every day I'm like, how am I supposed to feel every day when I see people in tents with nothing, you know? Because like on one hand, my psychopath therapist might be like, just be okay with it. You just, totally joking. She was plenty fine. But anyway, just like make peace with it all. You can't worry too much about it. And I always wonder like, How good is that to have that attitude? I don't know. It does. It seems like it would reduce your ability to help on the, I guess if I was making like like a counter argument. Sometimes there is that like a numbers problem where you get too overwhelmed and then you're like, well, things are so bad that I just, there's no point in doing anything.

0:12:32 Lindsey: Yeah.

0:12:46 Thomas: So maybe this could help. There could be some effect of like that, like countering that feeling.

0:12:45 Lindsey: Can't do anything. Yeah, yeah, I could see that. I but where we're going is that it might is that mindfulness meditation might reduce the motivation entirely. Right. And and that would be a problem. So if the thing you're trying to do is is prevent yourself from becoming overwhelmed. That might be one thing, but yeah, tricky though, right? This is not a straightforward kind of relationship. So these are, these are functional emotions, right. If I do something to someone that is, does actually require me to do something about it, like to make amends for it in some way. That In case, like feeling guilt is part of the motivational process of coming back to them later, right, Like feeling bad about that, thinking about what I said, and then all of that motivates the apology and trying to make it up to them. So I think we all know this from personal experience that guilt motivates us to repair harms that we've caused. But it's important to say that the empirical work also bears that out. There's strong evidence for a causal connection between guilt and the motivation to engage in reparative behaviors.

0:13:00 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Yeah, mm -hmm.

0:13:48 Thomas: Guess I'm still now, are we talking about back to interpersonal? Are we talking about both? Maybe I'm sorry if I'm just getting confused on this.

0:13:56 Lindsey: What you mean.

0:13:57 Thomas: Well, that sounded once again, like interpersonal stuff and it was like, right.

0:14:00 Lindsey: Oh. So. So the the past work that I was talking about was pro social, like helping behavior, in a different kind of helping behavior. What this paper is going to focus on is specifically like making amends for things that you've done wrong, so they're looking at a different category of pro-social behavior, um.

0:14:16 Thomas: Okay. So then I think the thing I did bring up earlier would make sense. I guess I'm not understanding why that wasn't a good example. Like if this helps you when you're too mad at something, for example, when you'RE too, you upset over something, maybe reflecting on where that feeling is coming from and realizing it's temporary, maybe it is whatever would help you make that restorative gesture towards a friend you were mad at, for example.

0:14:37 Lindsey: I think that's right, um, sorry, I'm having trouble remembering like the context in which this first came up, so I'm not sure what I was saying it didn't map onto. To.

0:14:45 Thomas: You know what? I remember either. So let's forget it. It's fine. Cares? Point is, those are examples that could happen. This paper that was on Facebook, that one now, so that we're all on the right track, that one is specifically looking at which kind of thing, the more broadly prosocial thing or the more interpersonal, like interaction type stuff or both?

0:14:48 Lindsey: Okay. All right. Yes. So to look at is like making amends after you've done something wrong, right? And they're saying like, they're situating it in the broader context of pro -social behavior in general, because most of the work seems to suggest that mindfulness improves pro - social behavior, but they're like, in this specific kind of pro social behavior when when you're making amends, it seems like mindfulness meditation is kind of tailor made to maybe reduce motivation to engage in that kind of behavior. The studies that they're going to do are like going to invoke feelings of guilt about something, and then they're going to see how mindfulness affects people's motivation to make amends afterwards.

0:15:40 Thomas: Make amends. So is this guilt about like, oh, there's too many homeless people or guilt about like you cut someone off in traffic or something, you know?

0:15:49 Lindsey: Kind of both. They look at both kinds of outcomes.

0:15:50 Thomas: Okay. So they're kind of both. Gotcha. All on the same page. Hopefully. Actually, I can't guarantee that, but for now I feel as if we're on the safe edge.

0:15:52 Lindsey: Yeah. Right. Okay, cool. All Right. Yeah, right. Okay. So all of this to say, right. You know, like I actually did ask this question of Sam Harris at some point, like on social media or something like whether it's, it's always desirable to Dampen functional emotions, right? Whether You need to be doing something in addition to that so that you're not diminishing motivation to appropriately respond when you've done something wrong and you need to take action. So anyway, so these authors share those concerns and their paper examines the following research questions. So does mindfulness meditation reduce guilt and prosocial reparative behaviors after committing a wrong?

And they hypothesize that breathing-focused mindfulness meditation, which is a very common form that's practiced now, will reduce guilt, and that this will in turn reduce motivation to engage in prosozial reparative behavior. And their second research question is, are there ways of practicing mindfulness that do not entail the side effect of diminishing prosocial reparative behaviors. And so to explore this question, they're going to compare breathing-focused mindfulness meditation with loving-kindness meditation, which focuses attention on love and concern for the well-being of other people.

And they predict that both breathing-focus mindfulness and loving-kindness meditation will reduce distraction and promote mindfulness, but they also predict that unlike unlike breathing-focused meditation, loving-kindness will not reduce prosocial reparative behaviors because it focuses attention on the well-being of others rather than directing attention inward toward the self.

0:16:09 Thomas: Hmm. Seems Like a sensible prediction, yeah.

0:17:25 Lindsey: Yeah, right? Just to be completely fair to Sam Harris, loving kindness is another form of meditation that he talks about a lot. So that's So they tested these hypotheses in a series of eight experiments. They said it was only five, but that's because they were clustering some replication things together. Other. The first seven experiments compared the effects of mindfulness meditation to various control conditions on feelings of guilt and motivation to engage in reparative behaviors. And the eighth experiment compared the affects of breathing -focused mindfulness with loving -kindness meditation on guilt and reparative behavior. There's a lot of overlap in the methods that they use across these eight experiments.

So to consolidate, I'm going to give a few overview details about the samples and the procedures, and then we'll just run through the unique aspects and findings from each study. Their sample sizes for each study range from 102 to 250 people. And so across all studies, they had just over 1300 participants, pretty good. And they did ensure that they had a minimum of 50 participants per experimental condition. And that's in line with current statistical recommendations.

Terms of basic demographics, most of their samples were pretty well balanced with regard to gender. And the average age of the samples range from 21 years old to 40 years old. Terms of how they selected their participants, five out of their eight samples were online samples recruited from Amazon's Mechanical Turk, also called MTurk. I think this has come up before, but yeah, it's an online platform where people and businesses can outsource various tasks, and usually pretty menial ones. So like identifying objects in photos, like CAPTCHA,

0:17:30 Thomas: Yeah. Uh.

0:18:54 Thomas: There.

0:18:54 Lindsey: Some of the things you see on here, or transcribing audio. So you post these jobs on MTurk for a particular amount of money, and workers can elect to perform that work for you. And a while back, researchers started using MTurK to recruit online samples. So MTurks workers can be compensated for completing questionnaires and cognitive tasks. Time MTurkk comes up, I do like to plug Prolific Academic, because they are a platform that like, was kind of inspired by MTurkg, but is specifically for social sciences research. And unlike MTurkh, they actually have have a minimum compensation standard. So most MTurk Workers get paid less than the minimum wage for their work, which also do things to deal with like data quality issues that have come up in MTurks. But anyway, you these researchers took steps to make sure that their data quality was good and they were pretty good about compensating at a fair rate, but I just wanted to throw that out there.

0:19:27 Thomas: You. Go. Gotcha.

0:19:43 Thomas: Surf.

0:19:43 Lindsey: So all MTurk was five of the eight samples. The remaining three samples were business school students from Portugal and the United States. So those are the main points to highlight about their participants. In terms of how they were operationalizing their primary variables, also a lot of redundancy across studies here. So in terms of inducing mindfulness, they used the same technique across all of their studies, which was this eight -minute recording of a guided breathing -focused meditation, which was prepared by a professional mindfulness meditation instructor.

And the recording instructed participants to bring their awareness to the physical sensations of the breath and not to judge themselves if their mind wandered, but to return their attention to the breath. So pretty standard mindfulness instruction for the breathing focused type. Particular recording is one that has been used in past studies on mindfulness, and it has been validated to actually induce state mindfulness. So that's important to say. Yeah. Terms of the control conditions, the researchers did a few different things across the studies.

So in five out of the eight studies, they used an eight minute mind wandering recording in their control conditions. So this was done by the same instructor who did the mindfulness recording, nice standardization there. And it guided participants to think about whatever came into their minds. And this has been demonstrated in past research to essentially like replicate a baseline mental state, essentially. That was their most most common control condition.

In two studies, they used a distraction control condition, so instead of listening to a control recording for eight minutes, participants browsed the internet for eight moments. Then finally, in two studies they included a no -treatment control group, so the control group didn't listen to any recordings or do any tasks, they just moved on to the next study task. Okay, each of these control conditions has different strengths and drawbacks and they allow us to understand the effects of mindfulness practice relative to different states.

So, mindfulness versus mind -wandering should be a pretty good comparison between a directed mindful state and a baseline mental state. And in the context of their experiments, the mind -wandering state might include rumination on the thing that they feel guilty about, that kind of thing.

0:21:49 Lindsey: If you're looking at the mindfulness versus distraction comparison, the web browsing, allows us to look at or compare two strategies that people might realistically use to reduce negative feelings. And rumination. So one strategy might be to practice mindfulness, but another one that we use a lot, right, is to distract yourself.

0:22:08 Thomas: Reddit, yeah.

0:22:08 Lindsey: Yeah, Exactly, right? So we do that all the time. Probably my least favorite control condition that they used is the no treatment control because it provides the least standardization because they're comparing people who did a mindfulness task for eight minutes to people who just didn't do a task. And that introduces a number of confounds, right. Like time, for instance, the people in the mindfulness condition were doing something for this eight minute period before they do the primary outcome measure and people in the no treatment control group are not doing that so any differences they find could be due to mindfulness or they could be due to not having that eight minute gap or something right so I don't know if the if the

0:22:08 Thomas: They.

0:22:46 Thomas: Weren't.

0:22:46 Lindsey: No treat, nope.

0:22:47 Thomas: Like doing nothing for eight minutes or like doing anything for eight. Minutes or something, okay.

0:22:50 Lindsey: They Just didn't Do it, yeah, so they just went right into the last task, um, it's, it's not great, you know, so if the note treatment control had been the only control condition they used across their studies that would be a pretty big problem for interpreting their findings. But didn't do that. They had these other control groups. And in aggregate, I think it ends up being useful to see what mindfulness does relative to these other things. The way that they measured feelings of guilt across all of their studies was with a modified version of something called the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule, or PANAS, which is a common mood measure. So it just asked people to report how much they are are currently experiencing a list of feelings, like interested, excited, strong, jittery, afraid, and guilty. Most studies, or in most of their studies, their measure of guilt comprised ratings of the word guilty, as well as the word blameworthy, which they averaged to create a single guilt score. They had the participants rate the other emotions too, which is a smart way of trying to obscure what you're studying.

0:22:51 Thomas: Hmm. Right.

0:23:45 Lindsey: So if participants, Yeah, if they just got the guilt words, they'd be more likely to guess what the study's about. Set of important procedures and measures in their studies are those relating to how they induced feelings of guilt in participants, and then how they assessed those pro-social reparative behaviors. This is the element of their studies that had the most variability across each experiment, so I'm just going to explain those as we go along. In their first experiment, they're just providing evidence for one of their basic premises, which is that mindfulness practice reduces guilt. So they had their sample of mTurk workers think of a past event that they felt guilty about and then to write about it for at least five minutes, this is this is a pretty standard method of inducing these types of feelings. I've used these kinds of reliving methods to induce feelings of acceptance by having people think about a time they were accepted. They work pretty well to elicit those feelings. Participants who were in the control condition instead wrote for five minutes about what they did the previous day, which

0:23:47 Thomas: Did Okay.

0:24:41 Lindsey: On average should be a pretty neutral prompt, right? People are going to vary in how good a day they had yesterday, but on average. Coverage, participants completed the PANIS to get that measure of guilt. Then they were randomly assigned to either listen to the eight minute mindfulness recording or the mind wandering recording. And then they filled out the Pанis again to see if feelings of guilt changed after doing the mindfulness recording.

They found, as you might expect, that people felt guiltier after being specifically instructed to recall a guilt -inducing event than if they just thought about the previous day, and they found support for their hypothesis. So those guilty feelings dropped significantly if the participants then listened to a mindfulness recording compared to the mind -wandering recording. So one hypothesis down, this is evidence that mindfulness reduces guilt. The next three experiments, the researchers tested another foundational hypothesis, which was that mindfulness produces motivation to engage in reparative prosocial behaviors.

Behaviors, these three studies are all with participants recruited from a school. In the first experiment, participants listened to either the mindfulness or the mind -wandering recording, and then they read two vignettes that were designed to induce guilt. So in the first vignette, they imagined that they were the CEO of a pulp mill in a developing country, and they came to find out, long after purchasing the land and operating the mill, that the land on which the the mill operated had previously belonged to indigenous people.

And participants were then asked to estimate the likelihood that they would donate a quarter of the purchased land in order to improve local living conditions. And so this was their motivation of, or measure of motivation to engage in reparative behaviors. In the second scenario, participants

0:24:44 Thomas: Is

0:26:19 Lindsey: Once, um, maybe.

0:26:20 Thomas: There going to be a problem with the sample being from business school? You know, like, right.

0:26:26 Lindsey: So one thing I'll say is that across all eight of these experiments, they, get starting consistent results. So if you were getting inconsistencies, I'd say yes, you might want to inspect that a little bit. Really, they replicate these same basic effects over and over and over in these samples. So I are some peculiarities about the business students though that we might want to come back to. The ones in Portugal, apparently they had to exclude at really high rates because they were very suspicious of the researchers. I don't know. It was, it was kind of interesting, but, oh,

0:26:55 Thomas: I'll note that I I went to business school so don't, don't where I'm not slandering. Well, I am, but I'm it's because I'm... Can I'm allowed to. No, I don't know. Yeah.

0:26:57 Lindsey: I see. Hmm. That might be why they chose the specific, um, scenarios that they did. Cause both of these are like, imagine you're a CEO and then this happens. So they may have tailored it for that audience. So in the, in the second scenario, participants, once again, imagine that they are CEO, this time of a company that deals with hazardous materials. And they're told that the company's current regulation in terms of how they dispose of hazardous materials is currently underdeveloped. And then they asked the participants to estimate the likelihood that they would invest money into a new environmental policy that would reduce air pollution created by their company.

Both of these scenarios are kind of like collective guilt kind of scenarios instead of being interpersonal. The second and third experiments are more about interpersonal scenarios. So in the second experiment, participants again listen to mindfulness or mind-wandering recordings. Then they indicate how likely they would be to engage in pro-social reparative behaviors in response to seven guilt-inducing interpersonal situations.

So for example, one of the scenarios said that the participants got a really large bonus for a project that they managed at work, but that their co-worker who had contributed substantially didn't get any credit or bonus for it. And then they asked participants whether they would share some portion of the bonus with their co-worker. And if so, how much?

0:27:10 Thomas: Yeah and then they executed the ones who didn't, I love it, this is great, creating a better world

0:28:21 Lindsey: Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Then finally, in the third experiment in this cluster, participants first recalled a past transgression that they had actually committed. So no hypothetical scenario this time. It's an actual transgression. They wrote about it for 10 minutes. Then they did the mindfulness or mind -wandering recording, or they browsed the web for eight minutes. So this third experiment had both a mind -wandering control condition and it had that distraction control condition.

After that, they were asked to write an apology letter to the person that they described harming. And then those letters were coded by independent blind raters, meaning that the raters didn't know the participants' experimental conditions when they read the letters. In particular, the rators coded for whether the individual accepted responsibility for their actions in the letter, offered to make up for their past bad behavior, and the ratars also gave an overall subjective score of apology quality. The results from these three experiments were very consistent.

In the first study, participants who had practiced mindfulness rather than mind -wandering prior to reading the CEO scenarios reported lower motivation to donate part of the land to improve local limbic conditions or to invest funds into reducing air pollution. And the effect size here was pretty decent. It was just over half a standard deviation difference between the average reparative behaviors in the two groups.

In the second study, participants who had practiced mindfulness rather than mind -wandering reported lower motivation to engage in interpersonal reparative behaviors, like sharing some portion of that bonus with a co

0:29:48 Lindsey: -worker. Yeah, I know, right? And the effect size was comparable to the first one, so still about half a standard deviation difference between the groups. In the third experiment, participants whose practice mindfulness after recalling an actual past transgression subsequently wrote the lowest quality apologies, whereas the mind wandering condition wrote the highest quality apologies and the web browsing distraction condition was kind of in between the two. Yeah. Only significant difference, though, was between mindfulness and mind wandering. Was significantly lower than mind wandering on apology quality, but the web browsing condition was like in between but not significantly different from either. Top line here is that mindfulness seems to produce worse outcomes in terms of apology quality relative to the baseline mental state that the mind-wandering condition is replicating, but not necessarily relative to a distracted state, which I think is interesting. So I think it would be interesting to repeat that study and see how often people report intrusive thoughts or rumination about the guilt-inducing event and see if that accounts for the differences between those conditions. Because I would expect,

0:29:48 Thomas: Assholes wow interesting does

0:30:53 Lindsey: Yeah, I would expect mind wandering to be the highest, followed by distraction, followed by mindfulness. And that could account for that. So lots of good stuff in those experiments. I really like that they're using three different types of guilt induction, three different kinds of reparative behaviors. And I like the addition of the distraction control group in this third study. So this nice convergent evidence across these.

Two experiments measured both guilt and reparative motivations so that the researchers could formally evaluate whether the reduction in reparative motivations is because of the reduction in feelings of guilt. So both of these studies used exactly the same methods. So they, they did a study and then they did an exact replication of it to strengthen the evidence that it's reliable. Um, the only methodological difference was that the second study had a slightly larger sample size. So it was 250 people versus 200 people in the first study.

So MTurk workers were asked to think of a past transgression that they committed and to write about it for several minutes. They were randomly assigned to either do the mindfulness meditation or a no treatment control group. Again, not sure why they did this instead of mind wandering. Does not seem like a great decision. Whatever. Whatever. They reported their feelings of guilt, and then they completed a task in which they could allocate some portion of a hypothetical $100 to the person that they said they harmed.

So they were given this hypothetical $200, and they were able to get a $100 from the person and then had three options in terms of how they could use it. They could keep some of all of it, some or all of them for themselves, they could donate some or it to a charity for flood victims, or they could give some or the person they wronged as a birthday present.

0:32:28 Thomas: This have the problem that some of these have, like, the marshmallow-type stuff, where it's like if you, come, I'm from a really bad socioeconomic background, you're gonna be like, I need this money, you

0:32:38 Lindsey: Differences like that could definitely create variability. I wouldn't expect those differences to specifically be in one group more than another. So I don't know if it's like a threat to the...

0:32:47 Thomas: Gotcha so, so that might cancel out because you're testing the same thing, depending on which group you're in, okay makes

0:32:49 Lindsey: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah, so since they use random assignment here, you wouldn't expect that to be a problem. Yeah? Studies here, to the control group, participants who practice mindfulness after they recalled a past transgression reported feeling less guilt, and then they allocated less money on average to the person that they had wronged. So folks in the mindfulness condition gave about $8 less than the control condition in the first study, and about $6 less in the second study. The effect size there was about a third of a standard deviation in both studies, which is a moderate and effect size. The researchers also did that formal mediation analysis, and they found that the reduction in guilt fully explained why the mindfulness condition reduced the

0:32:59 Thomas: Sense, huh wow

0:33:35 Lindsey: Amount of money that they gave to the person they wronged. Other words, yeah, this is evidence that mindfulness appears to be reducing reparation behaviors because it's reducing guilt, which is interesting.

0:33:44 Thomas: Is that like an experimental jackpot, like, are you thrilled as a scientist when you're like, yes, 100% accounts for it

0:33:50 Lindsey: Yeah. Well, I shouldn't say 100%, but when you're doing a mediation analysis, sometimes when you account for the effect of a variable, there's still a significant amount of variance left over that's not accounted for it. But when say fully mediated, I mean that, like, the amount of variability that's left over after you account for guilt is not statistically significant.

0:34:03 Thomas: Okay

0:34:12 Lindsey: So it's than 0%. But yes, it

0:34:11 Thomas: Still feels like a, a good day when you're, this is your science thingy. Okay.

0:34:16 Lindsey: Is a good day. Yeah, it very much is. I always get very excited when I find fully mediating effects. It's very satisfying. So good stuff. Next experiment was interesting. They examined whether mindfulness meditation reduces the influence of guilty feelings on pro -social reparative behaviors. And I know that probably sounds very similar to the experiment We just talked about, but it's a little bit different. So in the last experiment, they measured guilt after the mindfulness or control condition and showed that guilt was lower after practicing mindfulness. What they're going to do in this one is induce guilt, then measure guilt, then implement the mindfulness meditation, and then measure prosocial reparative behaviors. So they're looking at guilt at sort of like different points in the process.

And they're examining whether the degree of guilt right after thinking about the transgression is like a less good predictor of its ultimate impact on the reparation behaviors after the mindfulness practice, if that makes sense. So both studies are converging on the same point, but together they create a more complete picture of the underlying process.

So MTurk workers first read a vignette in which they imagined that they had either participated in a team presentation, that was the control condition, or they had overslept for a team presentation and let their team down, and that was the guilt induction condition. Then researchers measured guilt as well as some other negative emotions like shame and embarrassment and sadness. Witness. Then participants either did the mindfulness or mind-wandering recordings.

Then finally, they had participants imagine that they were out to dinner with the team from the previous vignette, and that when everybody contributed to the bill at the end of the meal, the group ended up being a little bit short. So like, you know, if the bill was $100, somehow people had only put in $90 total or something. And they asked participants whether they would make a supplementary contribution to the deal between $0 and $9, and and that's their measure of pro-social reparative behavior.

Here's what they found. As might expect, people reported more negative emotions right after imagining oversleeping for a team presentation compared to giving a team presentation. And those negative emotions were correlated with how much people reported wanting to contribute to the dinner bill, but

0:34:39 Thomas: Yeah. Huh.

0:36:34 Lindsey: Only in the mind -wandering condition. In the Mind Wandering Condition, folks who felt more guilt and shame and embarrassment and so on after imagining letting their team down, also reported wanting to contribute more money to the bill. But among folks who listened to the mindfulness recording, zero of the negative emotions were correlated with the amount that they wanted to contribute at dinner. So this suggests strongly that mindfulness was effective at disrupting the normal motivational consequences of these negative social emotions. You know, usually we commit an infraction like oversleeping for a thing, we feel bad, we're motivated to make it up to people. But yeah, yeah. After practicing mindfulness, that motivation appeared to dissipate.

So the last analysis they did here was to formally test the whole theoretical model together. So they evaluated whether the mindfulness versus mind wandering conditions significantly changed the extent to which guilt explains pro-social emotions emotions, following, or pro-social motivations, excuse me, following a transgression. And it did. So folks who imagined letting their team down felt more guilty. And in the mind-wandering condition, that guilt explained their subsequent greater contributions to the dinner bill.

But in the mindfulness condition, feeling more guilty was no longer associated with wanting to contribute more money. Top line for the results, mindfulness seems to be disrupting that connection between feeling guilty and then being motivated to make amends for it. We're to their final experiment. So in their final experiment, they contrasted the effects of mindfulness with a different type of meditation, which is the loving kindness meditation.

So MTurk participants wrote about a time in their lives when they wronged someone, and they were specifically instructed to think of a transgression for which they had not apologized. And I think that this is because their outcome variable had to do with asking them to imagine apologizing. And so I think that they wanted to not run the risk of people just reporting how they actually apologized in

0:36:47 Thomas: Hmm.

0:38:28 Lindsey: The past. They wanted them to construct an apology. So thought about a time in their lives when they wronged someone, wrote about that. And then for eight minutes, participants listened to either the breathing -focused mindfulness recording or loving-kindness meditation recording that had also been used in past research, or they browsed the web. So they had that distraction control condition. Meditation manipulation, people reported how much they experienced self versus other focus during the recording, as well as how much love they felt during the reporting. And they measured these.

0:38:28 Thomas: Makes Sense That's That's a tough thing to quantify, but yeah.

0:39:04 Lindsey: Well, I can tell you what questions they asked. So, they were just...

0:39:06 Thomas: I 10 Love on this one and

0:39:10 Lindsey: Um, yeah, they, they ask questions like how loved did you feel and how much were you feeling open-hearted, as items like that. Um.

0:39:16 Thomas: You rate it on, what, a seven scale or something? Okay.

0:39:19 Lindsey: Yeah, just They're all Likert items. Um, yes, they measured, they measured these things, other focus, self-focus, and feelings of love, uh, because they hypothesized that differences in self and other focus and feelings of love would explain the differences in how the breathing focus versus loving kindness recordings would affect motivations to engage in reparative behaviors. So they're going to do another mediation analysis with these. Finally, participants were told to imagine that they have the phone number of the person that they described having wronged. And they answered a series of questions about whether they would contact that person to apologize, what kinds of details they would include in the apology. So would they take responsibility? Would they acknowledge the pain that they caused and so on? Whether they were engaged in other reparative acts. So would they do something nice for the person? Would they do something to make it up to the person? And so on. What did they find?

0:39:19 Thomas: Yeah And

0:40:09 Lindsey: First of all, they report that, or yeah, so first of all they report the results of a manipulation check that I think is worth noting here. So in all of their studies they've been measuring state mindfulness to ensure that people are actually experiencing more mindfulness after they do these mindfulness recordings compared to the control conditions. And they have been. The manipulation, manipulation checks have been working. In this study, what they found is that both the breathing mindfulness meditation and the loving kindness meditation equally increased mindfulness relative to the web browsing control condition. So that's an important thing to say. Loving kindness is inducing state mindfulness. It's just doing it in a different way. And it's doing it to exactly the same degree.

0:40:51 Thomas: So do you think it's uh straightforward to measure quote unquote quote mindfulness right?

0:40:56 Lindsey: Can tell you how they did measure it.

0:40:58 Thomas: Tell me about it, and then uh I'm curious of your thoughts of how well that's measuring mindfulness. Hmm.

0:41:03 Lindsey: I'm curious about your thoughts as well. So they have them answer a series of items about the extent to which they were focused on their breathing during the recording, um, much they were focused on the physical sensations of their breath, um, present moment, as well as the extent to which they felt in touch with their body. Do you think that sounds like a reasonable

0:41:22 Thomas: And those are things, you're not getting two different responses from the same person, are you? You're just like on aggregate the people who did this meditation had these scores, and the people who didn't add these scores. Okay. Yeah, no, that makes sense. I guess you, either way you would have been prompted, I guess. Like you would've, it's not like, I was wondering if the people meditated would be like more likely to be like, oh yeah, those are the things I was trying to do when I meditated. So definitely, but I guess maybe that would go the other way too. I don't know. Yeah.

0:41:34 Lindsey: Yes. Yeah, yeah.

0:41:50 Lindsey: You're thinking relative to the distraction condition. I wasn't even thinking about that. No, I mean, risk with items this, that you're going to get, the way you measure it, is going to elicit kind of the responses that you expect. Especially the comparison between the mindfulness and loving kindness conditions, I think is a meaningful comparison. Because I mean there is stuff at the beginning when you're inducing the the loving kindness one where they, you know, couple of minutes do focus on breath and stuff, but like most of the of the recording is not about those things, it's it's about focusing on other people, so the fact that they got um responses in those two conditions, I actually was kind of surprised at at first.

0:42:27 Thomas: Cool. Hmm. Right. When are we drum rolling? This is so ironclad. They're checking so many different ways to get these results. I don't know when to drum roll, or if I should just always be drum rolling, just constantly. A, always be.

0:42:27 Lindsey: Um. Um.

0:42:39 Lindsey: Always Always be Drum roll-y. All right. So on to the results of their hypothesis test. Is that a good cue for a drum roll?

0:42:49 Thomas: If you say so, scientist. I don't.

0:42:51 Lindsey: Okay. So participants in the mindfulness condition reported the lowest intentions to engage in reparative behaviors. The loving kindness condition reported the highest intentions to engaged in reparitive behaviors. And the web browsing distraction condition was in between the two, right? So similar to the pattern that they found in that previous study that had the distraction condition. The only significant difference here was between mindfulness and loving kindness.

Participants who browsed the web reported motivations to apologize and make amends that were higher than mindfulness, lower than loving kindness, but the differences were small and not significant if you compare distraction to the other two. Yeah, the only significant one was mindfulness to loving kindness and the researchers saw a similar pattern for feelings of love. So those feelings were significantly higher in the loving kindness condition compared to the mindfulness condition. And then web browsing was in between the two and wasn't significantly different from either.

Terms of self -focus, the mindfulness condition reported significantly more self-focused than either the loving kindness condition or web browsing conditions, which were both about equal on self-focus. So that kind of indicates that loving kindness is probably reducing self - focus by directing people to think about others,

0:44:04 Thomas: Right.

0:44:04 Lindsey: Whereas the web browsing condition is probably reducing self-focus by providing a distraction. And then the mindfulness condition obviously is explicitly focusing attention on the self. All three of the conditions differed significantly on other focus. So the mindfulness conditions reported the least other focus, the web browsing condition was significantly higher on other focus than mindfulness, and then the the loving kindness condition reported the highest other focus of all, right? It was significantly higher than the web browsing condition and the mindfulness condition.

Finally, researchers formally tested whether the relationship between the meditation condition and the motivations to apologize and make amends were explained by those changes in self -focus, other focus, and feelings of love. And they found that the increases in both the other focus and the feelings of love in the loving-kindness condition fully explained why the loving kindness condition increased motivation to apologize and make amends, right? After they accounted for those things, there was no significant relationship left over.

The implications of this experiment are that mindfulness practices that shift the focus to other people rather than to the self are effective in inducing state mindfulness, which is presumably a common goal for people who

0:45:18 Thomas: Yeah.

0:45:18 Lindsey: Are practicing mindfulness. But unlike the breathing-focused practice, loving-kindness meditation doesn't carry that risk of disrupting the role of negative emotions in motivating these reparative behaviors.

0:45:28 Thomas: I love it. So you still are getting the benefit, maybe, presumably. I mean, maybe there's other benefits that you might be able to say you're not getting, maybe if we did more experiments, but you're also not reducing your desires to help people, it sounds like. So we should all be loving kindness meditating or browsing the internet.

0:45:45 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah, that is their conclusion, right? I think so. It's,

0:45:51 Thomas: No, I guess that didn't really.

0:45:51 Lindsey: Yeah, Yeah, don't browse the internet. Yeah. So as the authors put it, quote, "Our results suggest that guilt-inducing transgressions are a boundary condition for the prosocial effects of focused breathing meditation, but not for the pro-social effects of loving kindness meditation." And I wanted to highlight this conclusion in their own words, because there was some discussion on Marcus's post in the SIO group about the fact that, you know, research doesn't suggest that mindfulness reduces prosociality across the board, or that it's bad across the border.

And that's true, right? Like, as we were talking about at the beginning, past research suggests that mindfulness is associated with prosocial behavior in contexts that aren't specifically about making amends or righting wrongs. But these results do suggest that prosozial behaviors, which are specifically driven by the experiences of negative emotion, may be disrupted by those kinds of practices.

So I like their framing of these results as capturing a boundary condition of the positive effects of mindfulness, and I also like the inclusion of loving kindness as a way of increasing mindfulness without decreasing that form of pro-sociality. So that's a science thingy. My verdict is two palps off, would science again, I think it's pretty cool. Yeah.

0:47:00 Thomas: So our verdict is Sam Harris better get on the loving kindness one, more so than the breathing, just purely breathing one. Yeah.

0:47:07 Lindsey: Yeah, I think he does both. I think he's talked He's talks quite a bit about both, um. I pretty interesting.

0:47:09 Thomas: I Yeah, I wonder if there's, I would be curious to see the other, if you want to get more granular, and like the other benefits of meditation, I'm wondering, maybe the breathing one, I wonder if there's like any sort of like anxiety relief that it might have that the maybe the loving kindness one wouldn't or something. I'm trying to think, of what do you think, if there would be anything there. Hmm.

0:47:32 Lindsey: So understanding is that they both have positive effects on anxiety and worry. Specifically if there's like a difference in degree there, but the practice of, you on loved ones and thinking about positive intentions and all those kinds of, like, apparently that has kind of like the same benefits in terms of stress reduction and things like that.

0:47:52 Thomas: Yeah. I wonder if there is any, any place where the benefits are, uh, different? Sure.

0:47:57 Lindsey: I I don't know. But this actually, it does bring me to one thingy that I thought was worth if mentioning, we had time. So The popular press write-up of the paper that Marcus posted, and in the research article itself, and in a couple of background papers that I was looking at, I found this point keep popping up about the specific drawback of mindfulness meditation potentially stemming from the secularization of mindfulness practice in recent years, which I thought was an odd point. And I didn't really understand the argument as they were describing it in this current paper.

But in this other paper that I found, they summarized the perspective that secular mindfulness meditation practices tend to focus on enhancing attentional control per se, rather than coupling that with any particular system of values or morality or ethics. And these practices have roots in these different religious traditions, right? So when they framed it that way, I think I do kind of understand the point. And it kind of reminded me a little bit of Aaron's talk at AACON, like that as a community, you atheists and other non -religious individuals need to be integrating centrally, inclusion and compassion values, right.

0:48:03 Thomas: Yeah. Yeah.

0:48:51 Thomas: Focus Less on our breathing, focus more on love and kindness, no? I get it, I Mean, but there's still, I mean, notably, and I'm not, this is not a disagreement or anything, but notably, loving kindness meditation still plenty secular, it's just a question of, yeah, like where we, where we focus it. So

0:49:06 Lindsey: Exactly. Yeah. Yes, it is. Yeah, exactly. Yeah So I don't think that the problem is the fact that it's secular, but I take their point that the way that it's been secularized is to strip out anything that has to do with values, right? I

0:49:24 Thomas: Does That mean, like, the more Buddhist approach tends correlate more with the loving kindness type stuff? Is that what we're getting at?

0:49:38 Lindsey: That does seem to be a reasonable implication to...

0:49:40 Thomas: Because I don't think there are a lot of Christians out there meditating on, I mean, unless you're calling prayer meditation. I don't know. They must be talking about that, right?

0:49:49 Lindsey: Yeah, I Think so. Those are the... I don't remember them talking about Christian traditions here. It Would tend to be more, yeah. Yeah, mean, I like the idea that the, you know, the way to integrate values into this practice in a secular way is just thinking about like desiring the flourishing of other people that Sounds pretty good to me. That's cool, yeah.

0:49:51 Thomas: Okay. Yeah. Right. Yeah, without a lot other nonsense you might bring in with the non -secular stuff. Who knows? I love it. Okay. So I think we've diagnosed Sam Harris and we know what's wrong with him now. No, not really. I don't really think this is that related, honestly. I think it's more whether you're constantly meditating on how much the damn kids are ruining colleges and stuff like that. I think that's more constant meditation on our woke people ruining the world. They should test that one.

0:50:12 Lindsey: No.

0:50:21 Lindsey: He's He's Got worse Issues. Yes, yep, constant.

0:50:37 Lindsey: Meditation on whether it's just that black people are more criminal, yeah. All Those I

0:50:40 Thomas: Yeah, could All that. All all that together. More on your breathing, Sam. Maybe that'd be better than, you know, one stage at a time, I think. This was super fun. Keep sharing the science thingies in the Facebook group, everybody. I think Lindsay's got like several months worth of work cut out for her from your posts and I love it.

0:50:59 Lindsey: Do. I'm Very Excited, yeah.

0:51:00 Thomas: And That's not even counting science thingies I've already shared with Lindsay on my own. So we got so many science thingys to get Lindsay's expert view on, and this one, two palps way up, good science thingy you had a few quibbles.

0:51:01 Lindsey: Two Palps, Completely broken off, yeah, it's correct.

0:51:17 Thomas: Yeah, yeah, better than if they're not broken off, I think, from my memory of this is very, and you to have watched a lot of our streams to understand that, but that's okay. Right, well, uh, this has been, uh, SIO, there's been another science thingie, and uh, thanks, so loving kindness, everybody. I'd be curious, uh, if people want to share their meditation practices and what think is an effective kind of meditations, I'd be all ears. I've gotten off of the meditation lately, but maybe I should get back on it. Maybe it'll help with some of these things.

0:51:21 Lindsey: Yeah, you Know, loving kindness as a practice does sound more interesting to me.

0:51:48 Thomas: I'll be honest. I feel like I do this naturally with my kids all the time. All the time, I'm like, I love these kids so much and other people love their kids so much, you know? And like that alone to me is such a powerful motivator to try to make things better in the world. Like, I don't know. Yeah, I think that's sort of what I'm doing, but I guess I'm not like sitting with my eyes closed or anything, but.

0:51:52 Lindsey: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

0:52:14 Thomas: I don't know.

0:52:14 Lindsey: It Seems Like it would have similar benefits. I don't know.

0:52:17 Thomas: Maybe I could sit with my ice clothes and think about that. Nothing wrong with that. I might fall asleep, but kids also make me really tired. So that's part of it. Yeah.

0:52:19 Lindsey: Nope. True. Meditate On That, yeah.

0:52:27 Thomas: All right. Right stuff great job hey everybody support this show and uh meditate on that loving kindness patreon.com/seriouspod and uh thanks for listening we'll see everybody next time

0:52:28 Lindsey: Oh, Yeah,

0:52:48 Clip: Thank you so much for listening to Serious Inquiries Only. If you like the show, the absolute best thing you can do is support us at patreon.com/seriouspod. The second best thing you can do, is please share it on social media or by word of mouth. Speaking of social media, follow me on Twitter at Serious Pod. If would like to be Facebook friends, send me a request at facebook.com Thomas podcast. If not up for that level of intimacy, that's fine. Maybe you want to join the discussion at facebook.com slash groups slash SIO members. Thank you again for listening. We'll see you next time.