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Gratitude pays: A weekly gratitude intervention influences monetary decisions, physiological responses, and emotional experiences during a trust-related social interaction

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.paid.2017.01.043Get rights and content

Highlights

  • We conducted a study of how gratitude is related to trust-related behaviors.

  • We measured subjective responses, behavior, and physiology during an experiment.

  • People in the gratitude condition showed a greater willingness to trust strangers.

Abstract

Gratitude interventions assist individuals in the pursuit of greater personal and social well-being. Yet, little is known about whether these interventions increase interpersonal trust. In the current study, we tested whether a weekly gratitude-promoting intervention enhances the decision to trust a stranger in a monetary game several days later. Furthermore, we tested whether this intervention influences emotional and physiological reactions during the trust-making decision. After completing a gratitude journaling intervention or a control condition, participants engaged in a laboratory-based trust game. Continuous self-reports of emotional valence and physiological reactivity were recorded throughout the game. Compared with the control group, participants completing the gratitude intervention experienced more positive emotions and this mediated their greater willingness to entrust more money to a stranger. Participants who received the gratitude intervention experienced higher respiration rates and systolic blood pressure responses during trust making decisions – indicative of greater motivational intensity.

Introduction

Previous studies have documented how individuals achieve greater satisfaction with life after practicing gratitude interventions (experiencing and/or expressing gratitude; e.g. Emmons and McCullough, 2003, Sheldon and Lyubomirsky, 2006). Yet, there are few studies examining if and how gratitude improves interpersonal functioning (e.g., trust); a core feature of prosocial models of gratitude (DeSteno et al., 2010, McCullough et al., 2008). Exploring gratitude interventions and trust experimental manipulations in the same research study offer an opportunity to move beyond studies that are limited to self-reported interpersonal correlates of gratitude (e.g. Emmons and McCullough, 2003, Sheldon and Lyubomirsky, 2006), and trust (Dunn & Schweitzer, 2005); explicitly measuring the behavioral or physiological reactions during an actual social interaction. We aimed to provide causal evidence, that gratitude activity influences trust behaviors as a function of subjective and physiological components of emotional experiences during a social interaction. Unlike the majority of gratitude intervention studies that rely on self-reports (e.g. Emmons & McCullough, 2003), in the current investigation, we examined whether practicing a gratitude intervention leads to a greater willingness to entrust a stranger with personal monetary resources (a behavioral outcome).

Trust manifests in situations characterized by an important goal with a highly uncertain outcome, when reliance on another person is expected to increase the probability of a desirable outcome (Agneessens & Wittek, 2008). Individuals are more trusting after experiencing positive affect. Dunn and Schweitzer (2005) found that gratitude increases trust, negative emotions decrease trust, and gratitude has a greater influence on trust when individuals are unfamiliar with the trustee. Similar to prior work, we expected gratitude interventions to boost positive affect (Emmons and McCullough, 2003, Sheldon and Lyubomirsky, 2006) which would serve to mediate a greater willingness to trust strangers.

There is some evidence suggesting that being grateful promotes health, in terms of self-endorsement of less physical health problems, better sleep quality, and more time spent exercising (Emmons and McCullough, 2003, Hill et al., 2013). People need to efficiently mobilize their energy to tolerate and/or circumvent obstructions to desired goals (Mendes & Park, 2014). The willingness to view obstacles as challenges (as opposed to threats), where strength deployment and growth opportunities are increasingly probable, is characterized by a particular profile of cardiovascular and respiratory activity (Brindle et al., 2013, Phillips et al., 2013). From this work, we argue that more trusting individuals are more likely to experience arousal during their social interactions as a function of their approach orientation and risk taking propensities; less trusting individuals tend to disengage, concerned about the potential costs rather than the benefits of being vulnerable and reliant with other people.

We examined the behavioral and physiological effects of a gratitude intervention during an actual social interaction. We expected gratitude intervention recipients to show more trusting behaviors (as indicated by the objective transfer of money to the trustee in the “trust game”; Berg, Dickhaut, & McCabe, 1995), and experience and communicate greater gratitude when their trust is rewarded by the trustee. As gratitude is an emotion with multiple components, beside behavioral outcomes, gratitude intervention recipients were also expected to experience subjective, positively valenced emotions throughout the “trust game” and their physiological arousal would increase as a function of having a greater approach orientation to trust. Building off of existing theories and empirical findings, we expected greater positive emotions during the social interaction to account for why a gratitude intervention elicits a greater willingness to trust another person.

Section snippets

Participants

Participants were 61 undergraduates in Poland (50.8% female) between 18 and 32 years old (M = 22.05, SD = 2.28). We recruited an additional participant because one individual disbelieved the cover story for the trust game during debriefing. Two individuals, one from the control group and the other from the experimental group, with abnormal resting blood pressure (systolic > 160 mm Hg; diastolic > 90 mm Hg), were excluded from blood pressure analyses. We excluded one participant from respiration rate

Results

We found that recipients of the gratitude intervention sent more money to their trustees compared with controls (Table 1), t(58) = 2.39; p < 0.05; d = 0.63. Intervention recipients felt more grateful after they received the fair repayment compared to controls, t(58) = 2.23; p < 0.05; d = 0.58. Yet, both groups of participants communicated comparable level of gratitude to trustees for their repayment, t(58) = 1.55; p < 0.05.

The trust game resulted in an increased level of positive experiences in participants

Discussion

The present study examined how a gratitude intervention influences relevant objective behavior, subjective emotions, and physiological reactions during a trust-related social interaction. In the aftermath of a week-long gratitude journaling intervention (or a placebo journaling condition), participants took part in a laboratory social interaction. We found that gratitude intervention recipients experienced more positive emotions during the social interaction. This is the first study of

Acknowledgement

This work was supported by the research grant from Institute of Psychology, Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań awarded to Dariusz Drążkowski in 2013.

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