Beyond the Cushion: Does Self-Compassion Shape How We See Other People?

Picture someone meditating alone in a mountain cave. For many of us that image is mindfulness: one person, eyes closed, turned inward. It is a peaceful picture, and also a revealing one, because it leaves out everyone else.

The way mindfulness reached clinics, schools and workplaces has tended to reinforce that picture. It is usually offered as a personal skill for steadying attention and easing distress, and that framing makes sense when the goal is treating anxiety or depression. But it invites a larger question. Is mindfulness meant only to improve the life of the person practicing it, or does it also change how that person relates to the people around them?

What our questionnaires leave out

Psychology gave mindfulness a measurable shape by breaking it into components: noticing experience, putting words to it, acting with awareness, refraining from judgment, and not reacting automatically. Those pieces are useful for research. Yet none of the five most widely used mindfulness questionnaires includes compassion, or any concern for others, as part of what it measures. That is a striking omission given how central care for others is in the contemplative traditions the practice was drawn from.

The gap leaves some uncomfortable puzzles. Could a person score very high on mindfulness and still hold prejudiced views? Could a society full of mindful individuals remain divided, or even go to war? If mindfulness as we measure it says nothing about other people, we should not be surprised when the answer to such questions is unclear.

Why social attitudes, and why empathy

To explore the question, my colleague Polina Beloborodova of Virginia Commonwealth University and I looked at a trait called social dominance orientation. It describes how strongly a person believes that some groups deserve to sit above others, as opposed to believing that groups should stand on equal footing. People who score high tend, on average, to be more supportive of authoritarian leadership and more likely to express sexist, racist and xenophobic views. They also tend to report less empathy.

Empathy itself has become a surprisingly contested word. Right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk, for one, dismissed it as a made-up New Age idea that does damage. The research literature tells a different story: earlier studies have found that both mindfulness and self-compassion go hand in hand with greater empathy. That left an obvious thread to pull. If self-compassion relates to empathy, and empathy relates to beliefs about hierarchy and equality, then perhaps self-compassion and those beliefs are connected through empathy.

What we did

We analyzed questionnaire responses from two groups of university students. The first was gathered in 2019, before the COVID-19 pandemic, and the second in autumn 2020, after the pandemic had begun. After exclusions the combined sample came to 979 people. Participants completed the Self-Compassion Scale, which captures self-kindness, common humanity and mindfulness along with their opposites; the Interpersonal Reactivity Index, from which we used empathic concern (warmth and care toward others) and perspective-taking (the ability to see a situation through someone else’s eyes); and a measure of social dominance orientation.

Rather than testing a single pair of variables at a time, we used a method called psychometric network analysis. Think of a subway map. Each station is a variable, and each line between stations shows how strongly two of them are linked. The method lets you see which stations sit at busy interchanges and which are out on the edge of the map, and it shows which connections remain once all the other connections are taken into account.

What we found

Social dominance orientation sat at the periphery of the network, and its strongest link was to empathic concern. Empathic concern, in turn, connected to perspective-taking and to several parts of self-compassion. Self-compassion itself showed only weak direct ties to social dominance orientation. In other words, the route from self-compassion to beliefs about equality appeared to run through empathy rather than straight across. Empathic concern also mattered more than perspective-taking, which suggests the warmth of caring about others may carry more weight here than the intellectual skill of imagining their viewpoint.

Taken together, higher self-compassion and higher empathy went along with more egalitarian attitudes rather than authoritarian ones.

It was also notable that the networks from before and after the onset of the pandemic looked very much alike. The pattern of connections held up across two quite different moments, which gives some reassurance that it is not a one-off quirk of a single group.

What this does not show

This was an exploratory study, and it deserves a cautious reading. It relied on self-report questionnaires completed by university students, so we cannot assume the same picture holds for the wider population. Network analysis maps associations and does not reveal which way influence runs. We cannot say that becoming more self-compassionate makes someone more egalitarian; it is just as plausible that people who already care about equality are more drawn to kindness toward themselves, or that something else shapes both.

Where this could lead

The natural next step is an experiment. Programs such as Mindful Self-Compassion, an eight-week course designed to build kindness toward oneself, could be studied with measures of empathy and attitudes toward equality collected before, during and after. If empathy rises and beliefs about hierarchy soften, that would be far stronger evidence that the link is more than a statistical pattern.

If it holds up, the implications reach beyond the therapy room. Self-compassion could earn a place not only in treatment for distress but in social-emotional learning in schools, where the aim is to raise people who are caring as well as calm. The Dalai Lama makes a related argument in The Book of Joy: that the most dependable way to change the world is to teach compassion, because so much of what ails society is a shortage of kindness and genuine care for others’ wellbeing.

None of this needs a cave. It may simply need us to ask, whenever we talk about mindfulness and self-compassion, who else is in the room.

About this piece: A version of this essay first appeared in Greater Good Magazine as “Can Self-Compassion Change the Way You See Society?” The study it discusses is Juberg, M., & Beloborodova, P. (2025). Empathy as the critical link between self-compassion and social dominance orientation. Mindfulness, 16, 2602–2618. doi:10.1007/s12671-025-02651-3