Recent research published in the journal Mindfulness Compassion training has been shown to significantly expand an individual’s moral range. Researchers found that participants who received compassion-focused therapy showed increased moral concern for a wider range of beings, including family members, strangers, animals, and the environment. This effect was not only immediate, but also grew stronger over a three-month follow-up period.
The concept of moral circle refers to the range of entities or groups that an individual considers worthy of moral consideration. Typically, people prioritize family and close social groups, often ignoring those who are different, distant, or prejudiced against them. This tendency is rooted in evolutionary and psychological mechanisms that favor in-group ties. However, researchers have long been interested in what factors lead individuals to broaden their moral circle to include more diverse entities.
Compassion, defined as sensitivity to suffering and a determination to alleviate it, has been proposed as an important driver of moral expansion. Unlike empathy, which tends to be prejudiced and selective, compassion is thought to encourage a more universal and inclusive moral concern. Previous research has shown that compassion can reduce fear and prejudice, making it a promising candidate for interventions aimed at broadening moral scope.
“As a compassion researcher, I’m always interested in whether compassion training, like meditation or imagery, can help us extend compassion to others,” said James Kirby, an associate professor at the University of Queensland and author of The Compassionate Heart. Choose compassion.
“In meditation, we often focus our attention on a variety of objects: people we care about, strangers, or people we dislike. But I wasn’t sure to what extent practicing compassion would meaningfully change how we feel about others. I know that practicing compassion can improve relationships with people close to us, like our children and partners, but could it lead to increased attention toward people we dislike, who are different from us, or who are distant? I wasn’t so sure.”
“So when I read about the development of a moral expansiveness scale that covers a range of beings, including animals, and asks people to position those beings in relation to the degree to which they feel moral concern for them, I thought this would be a perfect scale to use to test whether compassion training actually increases moral concern for others.”
The researchers recruited 102 participants, all of whom were parents. Participants were randomly assigned to either an intervention group or a control group. The intervention group attended a two-hour Compassion Focused Therapy seminar, while the control group was placed on a waiting list.
The seminar combined psychoeducation about compassion, group discussions, and experiential practices to cultivate a compassionate mindset. Specifically, participants were introduced to core concepts of Compassion Focused Therapy, such as the “Tricky Brain” and “It’s Not Your Fault,” which explain the evolutionary and psychological underpinnings of compassion.
Participants worked through seven exercises: adopting a compassionate posture, using a kind voice tone and facial expression, practicing a soothing breathing rhythm, mindfulness exercises, visualizing a compassionate self, expressing compassion for others, and showing compassion for oneself. Each participant received a workbook and guided audio track to help them continue with these exercises over the next two weeks. (The meditation practice is available here: https://soundcloud.com/jamesn-kirby/sets/compassionate-mind-training-1.)
To measure the impact of the intervention, the researchers used the Moral Expansion Scale (MES) and the Compassionate Engagement and Action Scale (CEAS). The MES assessed participants’ moral concern for a variety of entities, from family members to plants and the environment. The CEAS measured levels of self-compassion, compassion for others, and perceptions of receiving compassion from others. Data was collected at three time points: pre-intervention, two weeks after the intervention, and three months after.
Two weeks after the intervention, participants in the compassion-focused therapy group showed significant increases in overall moral expansion compared to the control group, which was especially evident in increased moral concern for family members and respected individuals.
For example, the family subgroup’s MES score increased from an average of 9.54 at pre-intervention to 11.65 at the 2-week follow-up, indicating that compassion practices enabled participants to extend moral concern more strongly to those closest to them.
At a three-month follow-up, the results were even more striking: the compassion-focused therapy group showed significant increases in moral concern across all entity subgroups measured by the MES, including not only family members and respected individuals but also out-groups, stigmatized members of society, animals, plants, and the environment.
For example, the mean MES score for environmental concern increased from 5.69 in the pre-intervention phase to 7.54 at the 3-month follow-up, suggesting that the effects of the compassion training not only persisted but also became stronger over time, indicating a lasting impact on participants’ moral expansiveness.
The study also found that the helpfulness of compassion training was a significant predictor of long-term moral expansion. Participants who found the training helpful were more likely to show increased moral concern at a three-month follow-up. This suggests that the effectiveness of compassion training may depend on how well participants engage with and embody compassion training.
“Obviously, we only care about a certain number of people, and so the people we spend the most time and care about are the people closest to us, our family and friends,” Kirby told PsyPost. “But the world is not just about family and friends, and right now we have a lot of division, dividing people into categories of ‘us’ and ‘them.'”
“What we found in our research is that if we spend time practicing compassion, we can increase our moral concern. And that’s really exciting because it means there are pathways to bridging the perceived differences between us, and I think that’s a really hopeful message.”
One of the most interesting aspects of this study is the exploration of moral concern for “bad people” – people who are generally considered to violate societal norms and therefore often outside the moral concern of many people. Bad people in this study include murderers and other individuals who commit serious crimes.
Two weeks after the intervention, the intervention group itself did not show a significant increase in moral tolerance towards bad people. However, at a three-month follow-up, participants in the compassion-focused therapy group showed a significant increase in moral tolerance towards bad people. This suggests that while the immediate effects of therapy did not extend to people perceived as moral transgressors, cultivating compassion over time created a broader, more inclusive moral circle.
Although the results are promising, the study has several limitations. First, the sample consisted of primarily middle-class, highly educated, and predominantly female participants, limiting the generalizability of the results. Future studies should include more diverse populations to determine whether the effects of Compassion Focused Therapy are universal. Also, the study relied on self-report measures and is susceptible to biases such as social desirability, inaccurate self-perceptions, and response patterns that may not accurately reflect actual behavior.
“This was a randomized controlled trial, but it would have been good to have included some behavioral measures,” Kirby noted.
“The long-term goal is focused on helping people care more about others that they might not think about in their daily lives. And then to see if this influences policy decisions, we start to think about what sacrifices we’re willing to make to give opportunities to others.”
The study, “A Brief Compassion-Focused Therapeutic Intervention Can Increase Moral Expansion: A Randomized Controlled Trial,” was written by James N. Kirby, April Huang, and Charlie R. Crimston.
