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People's Egos Get Bigger After Meditation and Yoga, Says Study (qz.com)
An anonymous reader shares a study that finds contemporary meditation and yoga practices can actually inflate your ego. Quartz reports: In the paper, published online by University of Southampton and due to be published in the journal Psychological Science, researchers note that Buddhism's teachings that a meditation practice helps overcome the ego conflicts with U.S. psychologist William James's argument that practicing any skill breeds a sense of self-enhancement (the psychological term for inflated self-regard.) There was already a fair bit of evidence supporting William James's theory, broadly speaking, but a team of researchers from University Mannheim in Germany decided to test it specifically in the context of yoga and meditation.
They recruited yoga 93 students and, over a period of 15 weeks, regularly evaluated their sense of self-enhancement. They used several measures to do this. First, they assessed participants' level of self-enhancement by asking how they compared to the average yoga student in their class. (Comparisons to the average is the standard way of measuring self-enhancement.) Second, they had participants complete an inventory that assesses narcissistic tendencies, which asked participants to rate how deeply phrases like "I will be well-known for the good deeds I will have done" applied to them. And finally, they administered a self-esteem scale asking participants whether they agreed with statements like, "At the moment, I have high self-esteem." When students were evaluated in the hour after their yoga class, they showed significantly higher self-enhancement, according to all three measures, than when they hadn't done yoga in the previous 24 hours.
They recruited yoga 93 students and, over a period of 15 weeks, regularly evaluated their sense of self-enhancement. They used several measures to do this. First, they assessed participants' level of self-enhancement by asking how they compared to the average yoga student in their class. (Comparisons to the average is the standard way of measuring self-enhancement.) Second, they had participants complete an inventory that assesses narcissistic tendencies, which asked participants to rate how deeply phrases like "I will be well-known for the good deeds I will have done" applied to them. And finally, they administered a self-esteem scale asking participants whether they agreed with statements like, "At the moment, I have high self-esteem." When students were evaluated in the hour after their yoga class, they showed significantly higher self-enhancement, according to all three measures, than when they hadn't done yoga in the previous 24 hours.
There is plenty of commentary in Buddhism on why serious meditative practice needs to be done with an proper teacher and inside a proper community to avoid these very issues. Cutting Through Spiritual Materialism is a great text that discusses this issue and how to approach it from a Tibetan Buddhist perspective. This is really nothing new, far from it.
And, yes, if you have a set of random people meditate with no or little guidance for four weeks, there will be a ego boost. Longer term, directed practice is required for real change.
Did they make *any* attempt to distinguish between the two? If not, it's a worthless study.
Healthy self-esteem is based on a realistic and measured appreciation of your own good qualities ("I'm a good ukulele player"). Inflated self-esteem is, well, inflated ("I'm the greatest fucking ukulele player on earth"). Malignant narcissism, as seen for example in narcissistic personality disorder, also tends to include a competitive need to denigrate the positive qualities of others ("All other ukulele players are shit"), and tends to include the belief that you deserve special treatment because of your extraordinary qualities ("I should get my ukuleles sent to me for free, and I don't need to be nice to people because I'm such a genius at the ukulele").