It is not clear from the article how the empathy level of all participants was assessed before the beginning of the experiment. From what I read, it could have been random luck that people with more empathy were selected to follow the meditation training. What I am missing there ?
Assessing empathy would be inaccurate and subjective. The act of assessment may bias the final result. The random selection into two groups should do better than that, assuming the sample size is statistically significant. This experiment can simply be repeated to build more confidence in the result.
Moreover, would the meditation participants behave compassionately in other situations? A waiting room forms an implicit assumption that the present humans will have further interaction. What of compassion shown to stranger where the subject can be reasonably expected to assume a lack of interaction after the place?
Still further: what of the gender bias? A forty person study seems hardly likely to account for the gender bias inherent in compassionate activities. I would suspect that a male would be more inclined to give up his seat to an attractive female than any other, even regardless of the circumstances (broken foot, lack of chairs, etc.)
This "study" warrants some careful reading.
There is at least one more aspect to this , other than lack of empathy, I can think of.
Some people (ahem) are pathologically shy. Getting up in front of all those people and offering the seat to the injured person can be a physically painful act since it draws so much attention.
"We then randomly assigned 20 of them to take part in weekly meditation classes"
It makes sense to be critical of bad experiment design, and skeptical about extraordinary results. On the other hand, claiming bad experiment design based on the amount of data presented in the article seems premature. Maybe wait for the full paper and criticize the methodology if it appears flawed.
> Maybe wait for the full paper and criticize the methodology if it appears flawed.
Eh, if the authors and their university are going to promote this in the media--and, make no mistake, this has been promoted heavily in order for it to reach the NYTimes--then I think it's fair game. You don't get to publicize your claims on the national stage and then avoid criticism until after your paper is published and the reader has forgotten everything (except the vague impression that meditation is backed by science).
