Dr. David DeSteno

And there's a paradigm that's designed to evoke anger.

And the way it works is you create a...

You'd spend five minutes to write a story about your life's goals.

You have to then present this to the other subject, who they didn't know was an actor for us.

He listens to this and he says, really?

That's your plan?

That doesn't make any sense, right?

And this was a paradigm developed by an anger researcher named Tom Denson.

And we know it creates, you know, the HPA axis anger response.

And so it's really well validated.

And people either meditated or in this case, the control was an active control.

They had done lumosity brain training for a while.

And what we found is that those who, they were then given the chance to cause punishment to this person.

I won't go into it all, but they thought there was a way for them to cause this person pain.

The people who didn't meditate were willing to cause this guy a good amount of pain.

Now, it didn't actually happen, of course, but they thought it would.

Those who had meditated refused to cause him any pain.

They still said what he did was wrong, and they'd want to talk to him and tell him what he did was wrong.

But they thought that creating more pain

Pain and suffering was not the way to go about it.