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Study shows gratitude underlies social exchange and helping behaviour |
| TheallIneed/NC&T/NU |
In the forthcoming paper, "Gratitude and Prosocial Behavior: Helping When it Costs You," the authors present findings from three experiments in which the ability of gratitude to influence helping behavior is dissociated from simple adherence to common social expectations. The paper will appear in the April issue of Psychological Science, the flagship journal of the Association for Psychological Science, and is already available on the journal's website for early viewing.
According to co-author David DeSteno, the study provides an optimistic view of human nature. "Our research suggests that humans possess an innate capacity to act morally -- we help not because we know we should, but because our gut leads us to what is right," said DeSteno.
In demonstrating the role of gratitude in guiding reciprocal helping, this research provides some of the first experimental evidence identifying a unique emotional response designed specifically to address a fundamental challenge of human life: fostering and maintaining social and economic exchange.
About the experiments: In each of the experiments, participants are lead to experience specific emotional states through staged interactions in the researchers' lab that they believe to be real. For example, to induce gratitude, confederates (i.e., individuals working with the researchers in ways unbeknownst to participants) interact with participants to help them solve problems that would lead to undesirable results (e.g., having to redo complex tasks on laboratory computers); to induce happiness, confederates engage participants in fun tasks (e.g., viewing humorous videos). After engaging in such events and having their emotional states assessed, participants leave the lab believing the experiment to be concluded. However, in the first experiment, they are confronted on their way out of the building by the confederate with whom they were just working, who then asks for their help in completing an onerous task. In accord with the researchers' expectations, the amount of gratitude, but not happiness, that participants were feeling due to the earlier actions of the confederate predicted the amount of time they spent working on the onerous task for her.
In order to demonstrate that such increased helping did not simply reflect a quid-pro-quo action consistent with a social norm for reciprocity, the researchers repeated the experiment with one important change: a confederate whom the participants had never met approached them and asked for help on the onerous task. Once again, the more gratitude that participants were feeling, the more time they spent working to help the stranger. Given that they had never seen this person before, such actions cannot be attributed to adherence to a reciprocity norm, but are consistent with the view that feeling grateful made them more amenable to requests for help.
In a third experiment, the researchers also demonstrate that such increased helping was not due to adherence to other types of norms (e.g., the "golden rule" or "pay it forward"). In this experiment, the increased helping of strangers disappeared when gratitude was removed, even though the researchers increased participants' awareness of the fact that they were the beneficiaries of the kind actions of someone else.
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