“Mind-Body Practices & Self-Enhancement: Direct Replications of Et Al 2018’s Experiments 1 & 2”, 2021-09 ():
Mind-body practices (meditation, yoga) are popular, but their psychological effects are hotly debated. Some researchers view mind-body practices as “ego quieting”, meaning that they reduce people’s self-focus and desire to be better than others. Yet a recent study found that when Germans engaged in mind-body practices, succeeding at those practices became central to their sense of self. As they increasingly viewed themselves as skillful at mind-body practices, they tended to feel that they were better than other people overall (as shown by increases in self-esteem, narcissism, and beliefs that they were better than average).
Given these remarkable findings, we attempted to replicate the German findings in two samples of Canadians.
We replicated the finding that mind-body practices made people feel that they were more accomplished than others overall. When we combined the original and replication data sets, we also replicated the findings of self-centrality.
Thus, our experiments provide new evidence that mind-body practices enhance rather than quiet the sense of self.
Mind-body practices such as yoga and meditation are often believed to instill a “quiet ego”, entailing less self-enhancement. In two experiments, however, et al 2018 demonstrated that mind-body practices may actually increase self-enhancement, particularly because such practices become self-central bases for self-esteem.
We conducted preregistered replications of both of et al 2018’s experiments. Experiment 1 was a field study of Canadian yoga students (n = 97), and Experiment 2 was a multi-wave meditation intervention among Canadian university students (n = 300).
Our results supported et al 2018’s original conclusions that mind-body practices increase self-enhancement. Although the self-centrality effects were not clearly replicated in either experiment, we found evidence that measurement and sampling differences may explain this discrepancy. Moreover, an integrative data analysis of the original and the replication data strongly supported all of ’s conclusions.
In short, we provide new evidence against the ego-quieting perspective and in support of the self-centrality interpretation of mind-body practices.
[Keywords: self-centrality, self-enhancement, yoga, meditation, replication, open data, open materials, preregistered]