So I'm going to talk about the cognitive and social benefits of gratitude and I want to
start off with this quote by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. He said that "In ordinary life we hardly realize
that we receive a great deal more than we give, and that it is with gratitude that life
becomes rich." So the question before the house this morning
is "How does gratitude help us live well?" We've seen some really, I think, cool information
about how gratitude might help us live healthier lives. We have some information about how
it might help us live more healthy emotional lives, but how does gratitude help us live
well? We found this approach to be helpful... I
believe gratitude enhances well-being by amplifying the good in one's life. Just as the sound
going into a microphone can sometimes increase the volume of sound, amplify the volume of
sound, so gratitude amplifies the sound (so to speak) of the good in your life. Just as
a magnifying glass magnifies the text that it's focused on, so gratitude, too, magnifies
what it is focused on, magnifies the good. So, we believe that gratitude enhances well-being
by enhancing the good in one's life. Gratitude might enhance the good in your emotional
experience; we've seen a lot of evidence for that. It amplifies the good in your ability
to cope, so there's some evidence gratitude even amplifies the good and bad events. What
I want to focus on this morning is that gratitude amplifies the good in cognitive processes,
and amplifies the good in your relationships as well.
So, let's start off with cognitive processes. How might gratitude train happy habits of
thought? (Or, how gratitude trains your brain for happiness). We're going to focus on a
"Gratitude 3-Blessings Intervention" study this morning that I think demonstrates a little
bit (although we're really still investigating this, for the most part) how gratitude actually
might train your thinking in ways that enhance your future well-being.
So here's the procedure we have. We did, of course, various pre-test assessments and randomly
assigned people to one of three groups: a semantic memory placebo control group which
you'll see did, in fact, produce a placebo effect and a Pride "3-Blessings" control treatment...
now, in everyone one of these treatments, people did something every day for just one
week, and we did it through e-mail. In the " 3-Blessings Pride" control treatment we basically
asked them to recall three good things that had happened to them in the last 48 hours,
and then we asked each of them to write about how each of those things made them feel, better
than others or better than average. Now, you might say that's a pathological form
of pride: you're right, it is, but we wanted to isolate gratitude because if I just ask
people to say 'how does this make you feel good about yourself?,' people are going to
be processing those things in a grateful manner too, and I think you'll see it was probably
successful in that. The third condition was a "Gratitude 3-Blessings"
condition so, every day for a week, people recalled three good things that had happened
in the last 48 hours and then they simply wrote about how
grateful, how these things made them feel grateful. Then, we did all of our subjects
(and, of course,these were college students), did a post-test assessment, and then we had
a one-week follow up and a five-weeks follow up. So, what did we find? Here's the impact
(this is a composite well being measure), and what you see, first of all, is that, indeed, the placebo
treatment worked, they got significantly happier, I don't know, maybe recalling how you went
through the grocery store and how you got to campus that morning and what's on the front
and back of a dollar bill really does improve your happiness.
Unfortunately, for the "Pride 3-Blessings Group" there was really no difference between that
and the placebo condition, but, as you can see, the "Gratitude 3-Blessings" treatment did
outperform the other two treatments. Now, this is important for a couple of different
reasons; I want to focus on one: it outperformed the placebo test (which was increasing well-being,
not decreasing it) and so we know that it's doing something more than just non-specific
treatment effects, but the interesting thing (and it was a little bit surprising to us
but it shouldn't have been), is that the well-being of those in the gratitude treatment kept going
up after the treatment period. This did not appear to be due to the fact that they were
practicing it more than the others. They weren't, really. That wasn't related to outcome at
all. So, the question that I want to ask is: Why
does well-being continue to increase after the grateful recounting treatment is over?
We don't think this is just an anomaly of the results. As some of you are aware, Soligan
found something very similar with a similar 3-Blessings treatment. Well, we believe that
it is because grateful recounting trains cognitive habits that in turn enhance happiness. Grateful
recounting may train you to, first of all, notice the good in your life. It may train
you to make positive interpretations of good events, or more positive good interpretations,
particularly grateful interpretations, and it might even train you to reflect more positively
on your past. So, gratitude may amplify the good in your
thinking processes and now, let's explore how gratitude amplifies the good in social
processes. A lot of interesting research here. I think Mike McCullough's theory really does
demonstrate this quite well. First of all, Mike argued that gratitude operates as a moral
barometer. Just as a barometer is an indication of the weather, so too the experience of gratitude
is an indicator of your moral climate: when one feels grateful, one feels that others
have been good to them. Secondly, they argued that gratitude is a
moral motivator: stated very simply, when people feel grateful, they feel like doing
good for others, and you'll see more evidence of this in a bit. Very simply, gratitude motivates
pro-social behaviors, and thirdly, McCullough and colleagues argued that gratitude is a
moral reinforcer; when gratitude is expressed, it provides positive reinforcement to whom
you're expressing it too, and they're more likely to do that good to you in the future,
and research shows even to others that did not express gratitude to them. So, gratitude,
very simply, is good because it encourages moral behavior, both in the benefactor and
the beneficiary. So, let's look at the social benefits of gratitude.
Very simply, people like grateful people and this is a benefit to your social world. This
was a very simple study that I did years ago where I simply asked people to list ten people
that they knew very well and then rate whether each person that they knew well was
grateful, ungrateful, or if they were neither, to put them in the middle category. By the
way, most people put them into the grateful category. So, indeed, it's not just that grateful
people self-report being happier, and Bob found this finding too; grateful people's
acquaintances rate grateful people as being happier than ungrateful people, and also (more
critically for our discussion right now), grateful people were rated as much more likeable
than ungrateful people, and they also were rated as more likely to help them in the future.
So, this might be one important reason why grateful people are liked more is they're
more likely to help. So, one major social benefit of gratitude
is that people like you when you're grateful. Secondly, gratitude enhances our desire to
affiliate with others. Now, there's a lot of studies that demonstrate this. One of my
favorites, I think because it's my favorite gratitude experimental induction, was done by
Dave DeSteno and Monica Bartlett. Basically, what you do as a subject (if you're in the
gratitude condition), you come into the experimenter room and you take this long and boring questionnaire
and you get toward the end, and there's someone taking it right next to you who, unbeknownst
to you, is actually a cohort of the experimenter and they're talking positively with you and
whatnot and you get almost to the end and suddenly, the screen flickers and then it
goes blank and the experimenter comes in and tries to fix it and whatnot and says "You
know, this has happened before, I don't think we're going to be able to fix this. I'm going
to get a tech but you're going to have to start this all over again."
So, they leave the room, and then the person who's next to you, who you just think is a
fellow student like you, starts monkeying around with it and indeed, just plugs the
monitor in and oh, look at this, you've not lost anything and of course you're extremely
grateful at that point. In the control condition, they simply converse with the person and the computer
doesn't go haywire and whatnot. So, basically, in this study, after this was over, they just
asked people "We want you to come back to the experiment next week, would you prefer
working with a partner or working alone?" Those in the gratitude condition showed a
very strong preference for working with a partner, whereas those who were in the control
condition actually preferred to work alone. So, one of the things we see about the social
benefits of gratitude is that it enhances our desire to affiliate with others. Gratitude
also enhances our communal orientation toward others and Giacomo Bono and Jeff Froh's research
shows a lot of this, and that might be primarily because gratitude enhances our tendency to
include others. Again, Giacomo's research has found this; there's actually some experimental
studies that have found this too, that it encourages us to include others even when
it is costly to ourselves. So, gratitude is an inclusive emotion.
Fifth, gratitude enhances pro-social behavior. Again, lots of studies that show this, but
again, I like the Dave DeSteno manipulation here, so again, the same computer malfunction
kind of thing. What you can see here, and in this case, what happens is either the benefactor
(the person who fixed your computer), or in the control condition, just the person who
you conversed with, or a stranger asks you to do a long questionnaire, not for extra
credit, not for any more money, just out of the goodness of your heart, and they just
basically saw how long they spent on the questionnaire. As you can see, in the gratitude condition,
in the benefactor condition, people in the grateful condition spent a lot more time on
the questionnaire than did those in the neutral condition. Similarly, although a little bit
less, in the stranger condition, you found also that they spent more time on the questionnaire.That's
interesting, it's not even the benefactor, it's just some stranger asking you; if you're
feeling grateful, you're more likely to be more pro-social toward them.
So, we've seen a lot of social benefits of gratitude: people like grateful people, gratitude
enhances our desire to affiliate with others, gratitude enhances our communal orientation
with others, it enhance sour tendency to include others, it enhances pro-social behavior and
finally, as Sara Algoe and Amie Gordon's going to talk about later, it enhances our
relationships. Now, I'm not going to steal all their thunder, except for Sara's very helpful
theory about how gratitude enhances our relationships. She argues that gratitude helps us find new
relationships, gratitude helps remind us of relationships that are important to our well-being,
and finally, gratitude helps us bind relationships that are important to helping us living well.
So, gratitude helps us find, remind, and bind relationships and I think this is a very helpful
theory for understanding how gratitude provides social benefits.
So, as I conclude, "Why is gratitude so great?" Well, this morning I argued that gratitude
helps amplify the good in cognitive processes, and it amplifies the good in social processes
as well. How does gratitude enhance your well-being? This is the big question in my lab, and at
one time, we were discussing this, and I was pontificating and going on and on about cognitive
bias modification and information processes/grateful schemas and how gratitude might train benign
interpretations and better encoding and attention biases and et cetera, and finally I let my
students have a word, and I said,"Well, what do you think? How does gratitude enhance well-being?"
One of my students, who had migrated to the northwest from the south said in his thick
south Louisiana drawl, "How does it enhance well-being? I think it just makes you nicer."
So maybe, when all is said and done, gratitude just makes you nicer. So, I think I'll end
this talk by being a little nicer by saying thanks.
If you want more information about this, please e-mail me [pwatkins@ewu.edu]. If you really
want to know more about it, of course you can buy my book Gratitude and the Good Life,
but there's some research that says that showing my book indicates inauthentic gratitude and
you'll actually be less likely to buy my book so I'll take it off there. Ok, thank you!