Meditation practices show benefits amongst low-income teens
The US National Bureau of Economic Research published results of a Chicago-based after-school program for area high-schoolers aimed at slowing down their decision making process. It taught the students basic breathing and meditation exercises as a way of controlling their emotions, and it appears to have worked.
The program reportedly resulted in “significantly lowered crime and dropout rates for participants and boosted school attendance.”
As Gabriel Fisher from Quartz writes, research shows that low-income teenagers greatly benefit from a slower decision making process:
The goal of the program, explains coauthor Harold Pollack, a professor at the University of Chicago and the director of its Crime Lab, was to encourage less violent behavior by slowing their automatic response, rather than telling the students to be less violent. “If you tell the kids never fight, you’re basically saying don’t listen to anything else we’re going to say,” he tells Quartz.
In psychology, humans are thought to develop automatic responses to common situations to save time. For example, American teenagers from privileged backgrounds learn to automatically comply with authority figures, handing over their smartphone to a mugger, or quieting down when a teacher says so.
Low-income teenagers sometimes learn that submitting to authorities on the street isn’t necessarily the smartest or safest choice. For instance, handing over your wallet, instead of shielding you from further harm, may only invite more aggression.