Boosting Prosocial Career Aspirations: Loving-kindness Meditation Relates to Higher Communal Career Goals in Youth

Wanting to help others and benefit society in one's future career are examples of communal career goals. Raising these goals in youth should increase interest in HEED-occupations (Healthcare, Early Education, Domestic, and the Domestic fields) which are strongly gender-skewed and face labor shortage. Research has yet to find ways to increase communal career goals. In this study, we test the novel hypothesis that after listening to a brief loving-kindness meditation, participants will rate stronger communal career goals, as compared to controls. In three experimental studies, volunteering high-school students (Study 1 and 3) and university students (Study 2) listened to a 12-min recording of the meditation with the explicit purpose of investigating its effect on stress. They thereafter filled out an apparently unrelated career goal survey. We compared the results with a control group that just rated the career goals (Studies 1-3) and a control group that listened to calm music before filling out the survey (Study 2 and 3). The results showed that the high-school students rated higher communal career goals after listening to the meditation, as compared to controls. We did not replicate the result in the sample of university students, which could relate to adults having less flexible career goals than youth, or to a ceiling effect in communal goals. This is the first study that has demonstrated a method with the potential of increasing communal career goals in youth. In addition to increasing interest in HEED, raising communal goals could benefit society, since they are intrinsically prosocial.