Meditation is pointless, study finds

TLDR : no, probably not.

Meditation did indeed improve compassion when the intervention was compared with a passive control group, that is, a group that completed only the questionnaires and surveys but did not engage in any real activity. So participants who undertook eight weeks of loving-kindness meditation were found to have improved compassion following the intervention – compared with a passive waiting-room control group.

An active control group (eg, participants taking part in a discussion about compassion) is a more effective tool to isolate the effects of the meditation intervention because both groups have now engaged in a new activity that involves cultivating compassion. And here the results of our analysis suggest that meditation per se does not, alas, make the world a more compassionate place.

Double-blind designs can help to eliminate the accidental bias of the participants through the researcher. These biases have a longstanding history in psychology, and are called experimenter biases (when the experimenter inadvertently influences the participant’s behaviour) and demand characteristics (when participants behave in a way that they think will please the experimenter).

We compared studies that had used an author with studies that had used an external teacher or other form of instruction (eg, an audio recording). We found that compassion increased only in those studies where the author was also the teacher of the intervention... almost none of the studies we examined controlled for expectation effects [demand characteristics] , and this methodological concern is generally absent in the meditation literature.

Confirmation bias was particularly prevalent in the form of an over-reporting of marginally significant results. For instance, in one study the authors reported a marginally significant difference (p = 0.069) in favour of the meditation intervention relative to the control group. However, on the following page, when the authors reported a different set of results that did not favour the meditation group, they claimed the exact same p-level as non-significant.

https://aeon.co/essays/can-meditation-really-make-the-world-a-better-place