The Importance of Gratitude

Gratitude is an important prosocial emotion. In addition to facilitating and strengthening interpersonal bonds, gratitude has also been known to increase happiness, life satisfaction, and overall well-being. Despite knowing the many positive effects of gratitude, this emotion has seen significantly less research than the Basic 6 (happiness, sadness, fear, anger, contempt, and surprise).

A 2004 paper published in Cognition and Emotion aimed to provide empirical support for the theory that gratitude increases prosocial behavior. Much of the previous research had relied on self-report which has several pitfalls including social desirability responding, and low real-life transfer. This experiment investigated whether feelings of gratitude would increase prosocial behavior as measured by sharing money with a study confederate.

In this study, 40 female university students were randomly assigned to one of two conditions, Chance or Favour.

There were three rounds in this experiment. $10 each round was to be distributed either by a participant or by “chance”. In Round 1, all participants were told $10 would be split by chance between the partners. In this round, the participant was told they received $3 of the $10. In Round 2, participants in the Chance condition were told the money would be distributed between them and a confederate partner by chance again while in the Favour condition, participants were told the money was split by the confederate partner. In this round, all participants received $7. In Round 3, the participant was allowed to split the $10 between themselves and their partner.

This experiment found that participants in the Favour condition, who believed that their partner had acted charitably towards them in Round 2 gave their partner more than $7 out of $10 on average. This is $2 more than the average in the Chance condition, where people believed the money had been given to them by Chance. When asked why they had split the money as they had, participants in the Favour condition rated “to express appreciation” as the most prominent reason compared to “get money” and “act morally” in the Chance condition.

This research suggests that gratitude does indeed increase prosocial behavior, even when the cost is high (i.e., money is being forfeited to another person). While these results should be treated tentatively, as the sample is non-representative (college-age females), this is one of the first studies to empirically demonstrate an increase in prosocial behavior due to gratitude.