The Compassionate Instinct

It has been argued that males in particular may resist experiencing and expressing gratefulness insomuch as it implies dependency and indebtedness. One fascinating study in the 1980s found that American men were less likely to regard gratitude positively than were German men, and were likely to view it as less constructive and useful than their German counterparts. Gratitude presupposes so many judgments about debt and dependency that it is easy to see why supposedly self-reliant Americans would feel queasy about even discussing it.

We like to think that we are our own creators and that our lives are ours to do with as we please. We take things for granted. We assume that we are totally responsible for all the good that comes our way. After all, we have earned it. We deserve it. A scene from The Simpsons captures this mentality: When asked to say grace at the family dinner table, Bart Simpson offers the following words: “Dear God, we paid for all this stuff ourselves, so thanks for nothing.”

In one sense, of course, Bart is right. The Simpson family did earn their own money. But on another level, he is missing the bigger picture. The grateful person senses that much goodness happens independently of his actions or even in spite of himself. Gratitude implies humility—a recognition that we could not be who we are or where we are in life without the contributions of others. How many family members, friends, strangers, and all those who have come before us have made our daily lives easier and our existence freer, more comfortable, and even possible? It is mind-boggling to consider.

Indeed, contemporary social science research reminds us that if we overlook gratitude, it will be at our own emotional and psychological peril. After years of ignoring gratitude—perhaps because it appears, on the surface, to be a very obvious emotion, lacking in interesting complications—researchers have found that gratitude contributes powerfully to human health, happiness, and social connection.

I first started studying gratitude ten years ago. While the emotion initially seemed simplistic to me, I soon discovered that gratitude is a deep, complex phenomenon that plays a critical role in human happiness. My research partnership with Michael McCullough at the University of Miami has led to several important findings about gratitude. We’ve discovered scientific proof that when people regularly work on cultivating gratitude, they experience a variety of measurable benefits: psychological, physical, and social. In some cases, people have reported that gratitude led to transformative life changes. And even more importantly, the family, friends, partners, and others who surround them consistently report that people who practice gratitude seem measurably happier and are more pleasant to be around. I’ve concluded that gratitude is one of the few attitudes that can measurably change people’s lives.

THE SCIENCE OF GRATITUDE

At the outset of our research, Mike McCullough and I assumed that regularly practicing gratitude should enhance people’s psychological and social functioning; we then based a series of experiments on that assumption.

In our first study, Mike and I randomly assigned participants one of three tasks. We decided to encourage some participants to feel gratitude and others to be negative and irritable. We also created a third, neutral group by which to measure the others. Once a week for ten weeks, the study’s participants kept a short journal listing five things that had occurred over the past week. Either they briefly described, in a single sentence, five things for which they were grateful (“the gratitude condition”) or they did the opposite, describing five hassles that displeased them (“the hassles condition”). The neutral control group was simply asked to list five events or circumstances that had affected them each week, and they were not told to accentuate the positive or negative aspects of those circumstances.

To give a flavor for what participants wrote about, examples of gratitude-inducing experiences included “waking up this morning,” “the generosity of friends,” “God for giving me determination,” and “the Rolling Stones.” Examples of hassles were “hard to find parking,” “messy kitchen no one will clean,” “finances depleting quickly,” and “doing a favor for a friend who didn’t appreciate it.”

Although I believed we’d see the benefits of gratitude, I wasn’t sure this result would be inevitable or unequivocal. To be grateful means to allow oneself to be placed in the position of a recipient—to feel indebted, aware of one’s dependence on others, and obligated to reciprocate. An exercise like ours might remind people that they need to repay the kindness of others, and they may resent these obligations and even report strong negative feelings toward their benefactors.