"The psychologist Piercarlo Valdesolo and I have found that any marker of affiliation between two people, even something as subtle as tapping their hands together in synchrony, causes them to feel more compassion for each other when distressed. The increased compassion of meditators, then, might stem directly from meditation's ability to dissolve the artificial social distinctions—ethnicity, religion, ideology and the like—that divide us."
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/07/opinion/sunday/the-morality-of-meditation.html?smid=fb-nytimes&WT.z_sma=OP_TMO_20130708&_r=0
