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>WHEN a participant entered the waiting area for our lab, he (or she) found three chairs, two of which were already occupied. Naturally, he sat in the remaining chair. As he waited, a fourth person, using crutches and wearing a boot for a broken foot, entered the room and audibly sighed in pain as she leaned uncomfortably against a wall.

...and the results:

>Although only 16 percent of the nonmeditators gave up their seats — an admittedly disheartening fact — the proportion rose to 50 percent among those who had meditated.

So they had 39 people total. 20 meditators and 19 non-meditators. Of that, 3 non-meditators of 19 gave up their seat and 10 meditators of 20 gave up their seat.

Did they perform this study on sociopaths? I find it incredible that any able-bodied person would not give up a chair to a person on crutches.

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> Did they perform this study on sociopaths? I find it incredible that any able-bodied person would not give up a chair to a person on crutches.

How will you correct your expectations given the results of the study? It is possible they hired a bad actor for the person with the crutches and therefore did not trigger the same response as if the person was actually in pain.

Read up on the bystander effect: people really will ignore others in need if they see others around them capable of helping (and not doing so).

Bystander effect. Somebody should give up their seat! I'll wait for one of them to do it.

> So they had 39 people total. 20 meditators and 19 non-meditators. Of that, 3 non-meditators of 19 gave up their seat and 10 meditators of 20 gave up their seat.

Small numbers, but the effect size seems big enough that this would pass the (admittedly low) bar for p=0.05.

Incidentally, does anyone have a quick method for estimating the statistical significance of numbers like these?

You can do a student T test in Excel with TTEST(), I assume you have similar functions in OpenCalc.

OK, but is there an estimate I can do in my head? Or on the back of a napkin?

"The G-test statistic is 3.8189 so version 'Meditators' wins with 94.93% confidence." [1]

I'd have expected them to go for a higher level of statistical confidence.

1. http://elem.com/~btilly/effective-ab-testing/g-test-calculat...

In a harder science, sure. But 95% in psych strikes me as remarkably good (though I agree the sample size seems small).

I'm in an air cast boot thing right now and until recently I was on crutches. I'd say 16% is about average for people willing to look me in the eye and speak to me. Most people deliberately avoid eye contact desperately so they won't have to offer you a seat.

Methinks this is not about morality or (the lack of) compassion, but being more aware of your environment, i.e. mindfulness.

I would suggests the other people simply weren't consciously aware enough to notice, but would have gladly given up their seat if someone else pointed it out to them.

I remember reading another story where, they observed people being immersed in compassion or at least, being considerate. The experimenters then told the experimental subjects they needed to hurry to another building. Along the way, they passed someone who needed help in some way. Generally, even though the people were pumped, the ones who were told to hurry were more likely to ignore the person who needed help.

I don't think it is fruitful to try to scientifically evaluate morality. Morality from my own practice, naturally arises from awareness of [i]self[/i] as well as environment. What the professor said about meditation fostering perception of interconnectedness syncs up with my own experiences of this practice.

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