Can Self-Compassion Change the Way You See Society?

By Michael Juberg

The way mindfulness is taught and described today often seems to reinforce an individualistic and secular conception of contemplative practices. This makes sense when clinicians like me hope to empower the individual to see the profound agency in their lives to make healthier choices. 

If you want to control anxiety, it might be easier to teach an individual to practice mindfulness to promote adaptive responding, rather than try to control the endless variables that can cause anxious spiraling or hope for some far-off social transformation that will make inner peace inevitable. But is the point of mindfulness and other contemplative practices (as we teach them in medicine) really to benefit yourself only? This question has ignited healthy debate across various disciplines.

Previous studies have shown that those who score high in social dominance orientation also have favorable views towards authoritarianism, sexism, racism, and xenophobia — to name a few — and less favorable views of traits like empathy. 

What is the relationship between these practices, traits, and orientations? Previous studies have routinely found that mindfulness and self-compassion appeared to be positively related to empathy. Could contemplative practices such as mindfulness or self-compassion not only affect empathy, but also broader social orientations? This question motivated a study published in the journal Mindfulness. 

Empathy and Social Dominance
Our exploratory study gathered two large groups of participants and asked them questions related to self-compassion, empathy, and a construct known as social dominance orientation, which measures the generalized belief that people are either equal or that some groups are inherently more dominant.

We focused on self-compassion as a trait, which has only recently become a fascinating subject of psychology. More than “self-love,” self-compassion considers the relationship toward oneself. It includes aspects of mindfulness and self-kindness, as well as common humanity: the belief that experiencing suffering is normal in the human condition.

We used a statistical method known as network analysis. Think of a map that shows how major airports connect to smaller airports and how disruptions in one airport might affect the network of connections. 

The study grouped and visualized the variables based on the strengths of those associations. We ran the analysis across two samples, one before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the other after. We leveraged the once-in-a-lifetime unplanned timing of the pandemic to investigate whether the profound social disruption of COVID affected social beliefs. A strong body of evidence supports how threats and societal distress tends to negatively affect social attitudes. 

Despite the differences of social contexts, our results indicated the same pattern where self-compassion was related to social dominance orientation, but only through empathy. Of the two components of empathy we studied, emotional concern appeared to have a stronger relationship to social dominance orientation than the cognitive component. The amount of emotional concern was a stronger predictor of how you perceive and care about other groups of people. 

The study found that higher levels of self-compassion and empathy predicted lower levels of authoritarianism, whereas low self-compassion and empathy predicted higher levels of authoritarianism.

Compassion and Egalitarianism
These novel findings give theoretical support to how intrapersonal traits such as self-compassion are linked to broader social attitudes through empathy. 

The potential impact of those follow-up studies could be profound. If self-compassion could be improved as a core element of therapy or social-emotional learning in schools, not only would the individual have increased self-compassion, which would mitigate the risk of some mental health challenges and promote well-being, but they might also develop greater empathy and egalitarian beliefs, effectively widening their aperture of concern for others. 

By shifting toward a perspective that other people from different backgrounds are worthy of similar compassion and empathy as ourselves, we might be able to effectively address many of society’s ills such as racism, sexism, xenophobia, and the multiple forms of social division. As such, self-compassion as a focus may hold promise for fields like clinical and social psychology that support human flourishing across individual, interpersonal, and societal levels.

This article originally appeared on Greater Good, the online magazine of the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley. Click here to read the original article.