Can algorithms teach us to be kind and compassionate?

‘Loving-kindness meditation is a Radical Act of Love [to] maintain our individual and collective sanity’, writes Jon Kabat-Zinn, who secularised stress-reduction mindfulness meditation in the West. Initially in-person, group-based and teacher-led, mindfulness courses were then recorded for automated delivery through highly scalable mindfulness apps, which now boast tens of millions downloads.

Cultivation of kindness and compassion (K&C) is encouraged in mindfulness courses because this can both reduce stress and help communities. In teacher-led courses, K&C are thought to be ‘embodied’ qualities that the teacher implicitly transmits via interactions with students more than via meditation exercises. Apps lack these interactions and try to cultivate K&C only via meditation. But is this effective? K&C meditation can be psychologically and culturally challenging, so apps with no human support could cause harm. Research is urgently needed to understand both limitations and possibilities of cultivating K&C through mindfulness apps.

We will utilise interdisciplinary methodology from feminist health humanities and public health, to investigate how K&C are self-constructed through mindfulness apps, how users understand such training, what effect they have on everyday experiences with K&C, and what unforeseen and/or harmful effects arise from the automated cultivation of K&C.