An alternative explanation: a group of people were selected to participate in meditation training. This heightened their awareness of the supposed benefits/effe

An alternative explanation: a group of people were selected to participate in meditation training. This heightened their awareness of the supposed benefits/effects of meditation as well as its historical traditions. Perhaps some of them read a bit about Buddhism and compassion, or were freshly reminded of such things. This primed them to think of themselves as being more aware, compassionate, etc... and that self image would be in the foreground, since they'd just started meditation so recently. Hence, perhaps when they found themselves in a social situation that called for such things, their enhanced self image was able to override the bystander effect. IOW: "I've been meditating lately and meditation is supposed to make you a nicer person, so I should do something!" This would be in accord with lots of studies that show how you prime someone's thinking can affect how they behave. You could test the above hypothesis by studying people who weren't recently introduced to meditation, that is, whose self image had some time to return to some sort of base state. The trick would be to disentangle the actual effects of the meditative process from the aura of associations surrounding Buddhism in particular, and that might be impossible. To clarify my question: is it the meditation itself that makes you more compassionate, or the engaging in a practice long associated with compassion that makes you more compassionate?