There are lots of psychological
benefits to gratitude. Feeling grateful
to others can lift your mood. It
enhances your feeling of connection to other people. Gratitude can also motivate you to do work
for others.
When you feel gratitude toward
another person, you are feeling appreciation that the person has done something
for you that required some effort on their part and that was ultimately
designed to be helpful to you. When
there was no effort or cost to someone’s actions, then you may feel fortunate
that there was a positive outcome, but you are not necessarily grateful to them
for engaging in that action.
For example, suppose an electric
cable comes loose on your car while you’re driving, and the car stops by the
side of the road. A driver stops and
looks under the hood and reconnects the wire allowing you to get home. You are grateful that the driver sacrificed
the time to help you. If the driver of
the car sped by, but that caused a vibration in the road that cause the cable
to reconnect, you would feel lucky that happened, but not grateful to the
driver.
This analysis of gratitude
suggests that we need to make some assessment of whether the action of another
person came at a cost to them in order to feel grateful. A paper in the November, 2014 issue of Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin by Michael
MacKenzie, Kathleen Vohs, and Roy Baumeister,
suggests that people’s beliefs in free will may influence the perception of
cost, which may in turn affect the feeling of gratitude.
The idea is that if you believe
that people have free will, then you believe that the actions they are taking
were intentional. Those intentions
reflect that they have explicitly done things to help you. That increases your sense of gratitude toward
them.
In one set of studies, the
researchers simply measured people’s beliefs in free will and also their
tendency to be grateful. As you would
expect if beliefs in free will affect gratitude, these measures were positively
correlated. The more that people
believed in free will, the more that they tended to experience gratitude in
their lives.
Of course, it is hard to draw
strong conclusions from correlational studies like this. In another experiment, the researchers
manipulated beliefs in free will by having people reflect on sentences that
suggested that there is free will or that there is not. This induced a temporary difference between
groups in the strength of their belief in free will. Then, participants thought about events of
their lives in which someone did something for them. Participants were more grateful for these
events if they were induced to believe in free will than if they were induced
to believe that free will does not exist.
A control group who did not think about free will before the task
behaved similarly to those induced to believe in free will, suggesting that
most participants from this population of undergraduates tend to believe in
free will.
A third experiment also induced
differences in the belief in free will by using passages that argued that free
will does or does not exist. After that,
participants were led to believe that they were going to do a rather boring
experiment for another experimenter.
After walking to another room, that experimenter told them that the
study could be completed without their help and they did not have to do the
boring task. Participants returned to
the first room, where they were asked a few questions about the first
experimenter, including questions about whether they were grateful to the
experimenter for letting them go and whether the experimenter was sincere about
the motivations for letting them out of the experiment.
Participants induced to believe
in free will were more grateful to the experimenter than those induced to
believe that free will does not exist.
In addition, participants induced to believe in free will felt that the
experimenter was more sincere than those who were induced to believe that free
will does not exist. The belief that the
experimenter was sincere was able to statistically explain the relationship
between belief in free will and gratitude.
Putting all of this together,
then, in order to feel gratitude, you have to believe that the person who has
done something for you actually wants to help you. One factor that affects the sense that
someone wants to help is whether they have free will. After all, without free will, you are
destined to act the way you do.
This research also has
implications for companies who are performing customer service. If companies want people to feel grateful for
the service they get, it is useful for customer service agents to let customers
know they have some autonomy in the actions they take. This way, customers will believe that agents
have chosen to help them, rather than believing that something about company
policy forced them to be helpful.
