The Grateful Don’t Cheat: Gratitude as a Fount of Virtue

Abstract

<p>Gratitude has been linked to behaviors involving the exchange of resources. As such, it motivates people to repay debts to benefactors. However, given its links to self-control – itself a necessary factor for repaying debts – the possibility arises that gratitude might enhance other virtues unrelated to exchange that depend on an ability to resist temptation. Here, we provide an examination of gratitude’s ability to function as a “parent” virtue by focusing on its ability to reduce cheating. Using real-time behavior-based measures of cheating, we demonstrate that gratitude, as opposed to neutrality and the more general positive emotional state of happiness, reduces cheating both in a controlled laboratory setting (N = 156) and a more anonymous online setting (N = 141). This finding suggests that not all moral qualities need not be studied in silos, but rather that hierarchies exist wherein certain virtues might give rise to seemingly unrelated others.</p>

Gratitude, indebtedness, and reciprocity: an extended replication of Bartlett & DeSteno (2006)

“…First, we wanted to replicate the mediating effect of gratitude in eliciting help. Second, we wanted to test whether the computer crash paradigm Bartlett and DeSteno (2006; also applied in Bartlett et al, 2012;DeSteno, Bartlett, Baumann, & Willilams, 2010;DeSteno, Duong, Lim, and Kates (2019)) would also induce indebtedness, in addition to gratitude. Third, because we wanted to examine whether gratitude or indebtedness promotes reciprocating help, we would include both emotions in the same mediating model.…”

Monetary Incentives and the Contagion of Unethical Behavior

“…Another explanation is that large payoffs could increase concerns about the cost that is imposed on the experimenter (Gneezy, 2005;Fischbacher and Föllmi-Heusi, 2013). Gratitude has also been shown to enhance honest behavior (DeSteno et al, 2019). Unfortunately, we cannot disentangle these explanations.…”

Gratitude Reduces Consumption of Depleting Resources

“…Because emotions serve to inform the mind's predictions regarding adaptive behavior, we suspected that gratitude, given its links to increased cooperation and self-control (DeSteno, Li, Dickens, & Lerner, 2014;DeSteno, Duong, Lim, & Kates, 2019;DeSteno, Bartlett, Baumann, Williams, & Dickens, 2010;Smith, Pederson, Forster, McCullough, & Lieberman, 2017), might Gratitude and Resource Use 4 serve to combat the tendency to increase resource extraction in the face of other people's selfish behavior. That is, feelings of gratitude, even when incidental to the decision at hand, might nudge people toward decisions that, if widely enacted, would reduce the tendency to deplete publicly available resources.…”