Can Lovingkindness Meditation increase Trust and Trustworthiness in Strangers?

Bachelor Thesis from the year 2016 in the subject Economics - Other, grade: 1,0, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) (ECON), language: English, abstract: Kindness and trust are essential part of our society, since they are required everywhere where humans interact with each other. However, nowadays rising societal isolation and distrust within the society can be observed, therefore, we ask the question whether and how these qualities can be fostered. In this study, we designed an economical experiment in order to examine whether the traditional Buddhist practice called lovingkindness meditation can increase trust, trustworthiness and kindness. In order to assess the effects of time spent on practice, one treatment is a brief loving kindness meditation in a controlled laboratory context, while the second is an intervention lasting eight weeks. In comparison to the neutral control groups, a significant increase of trust, trustworthiness and kindness of the lovingkindness meditation group is expected. In addition, we hypothesized that participants of the field experiment will show larger positive effects in these three measurements than those of the laboratory treatment.