BY David DeSteno
When life's got you down, gratitude can seem like a chore. Sure,
you'll go through the motions and say the right things -- you'll thank
people for help they've provided or try to muster a sense of thanks that
things aren't worse. But you might not truly feel grateful in your
heart. It can be like saying "I'm happy for you" to someone who just got
the job you wanted. The words and the feelings often don't match.
This disconnect is unfortunate, though. It comes from a somewhat
misguided view that gratitude is all about looking backward -- back to
what has already been. But in reality, that's not how gratitude truly
works. At a psychological level, gratitude isn't about passive
reflection, it's about building resilience. It's not about being
thankful for things that have already occurred and, thus, can't be
changed; it's about ensuring the benefits of what comes next. It's about
making sure that tomorrow, and the day after, you will have something
to be grateful for.
One of the central findings to emerge from psychological science over
the past decade is that certain emotions serve socially adaptive
functions. When we experience emotions like compassion, admiration, and
shame, they drive us to alter our behaviors toward others. As Adam Smith
intuited long ago, these innate feelings, or moral sentiments, impel us
to act in ways that benefit our fellow humans -- to engage with them in
behaviors that foster the common good. And in the case of gratitude,
the evidence couldn't be clearer. In the face of loss, tragedy, or
disaster, few psychological mechanisms can do more to benefit an
individual's or a society's ability to thrive.
Much research, including from my own lab, confirms that gratitude
toward someone for past assistance increases the odds that we'll return
the favor and help a benefactor in need. That's fine, but in the case of
many types of challenges, pairing previous benefactors and recipients
isn't an easy or efficient process. There are lots of people -- those
dealing with the flooding in Colorado or those struggling to put food on
their tables, for example -- that need help immediately. What is
required for people and societies to recover rapidly, then, are
mechanisms that make people help others they don't know well --
mechanisms that push people to pay it forward to strangers.
This is where the power of gratitude really resides. Its benefits
come from an ability to create cooperation and support out of thin air.
In my lab, we've shown this using a simple framework. We stage events
where individuals experience a problem and then have someone come to
their aid just when it looked as if all hope were lost. The result?
Lots of gratitude toward the fixer. But that's not the interesting
part. It's what happens next that is the surprise. When these
newly-grateful souls subsequently run into strangers who ask for help,
they not only more readily agree to aid them than do individuals who
weren't feeling grateful, but also expend a lot more effort in the act
of helping itself. The more gratitude people feel, the more likely it is
they'll help anyone, even if it's someone they've never laid eyes on
before.
These benefits aren't limited to direct face-to-face encounters. Given the option, grateful people will make financial decisions
that "lift all boats" even when offered options to increase their own
profit at another's expense. In these times, where the click of a button
can move funds to anywhere in the world where they're needed,
gratitude-induced giving can have a powerful effect.
Such occurrences of indirect reciprocity -- the extending of help to
new people -- is known to kick cooperation in a group into high gear. In
the face of individual or societal tragedies, then, any phenomenon that
can enhance such indiscriminate paying-it-forward stands as a key to
resilience.
So next time you have the opportunity to say "thank you," don't let
it ring hollow. Embrace the gratitude; feel it as deeply as you can,
because in so doing, you're actually increasing the odds that in the
future we'll all have more for which to be grateful. On the deepest,
unconscious level, gratitude is really about being grateful for the
actions that are yet to come.
*Adapted from an op-ed by the author for the Boston Globe
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