On Thanksgiving, many of us take a moment to reflect on what we\u2019re grateful for \u2013 and we get rewards for doing so. Feeling gratitude leads to benefits like increased happiness and social cohesion, better health outcomes and even improved sleep quality.<\/p>\n
But will you get more of such benefits from that antique sofa you bought or the vacation you took? New research shows that we feel more gratitude for what we\u2019ve done than for what we have \u2013 and that kind of gratitude results in more generous behavior toward others.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur previous research found that consumers derive more enduring happiness from experiences than from material goods, and our new studies show that experiences generate greater feelings of gratitude, with its resulting benefits,\u201d said Amit Kumar, Ph.D. \u201915. Kumar published the study with Thomas Gilovich, interim chair and the Irene Blecker Rosenfeld Professor of Psychology, and Jesse Walker, a graduate student in the field of psychology, in a recent issue of the journal Emotion.<\/p>\n
\u201cThink about how you feel when you come home from buying something new,\u201d said Gilovich. \u201cYou might say, \u2018This new couch is cool,\u2019 but you\u2019re less likely to say, \u2018I\u2019m so grateful for that set of shelves.\u2019 But when you come home from a vacation, you are likely to say, \u2018I feel so blessed I got to go.\u2019 People say positive things about the stuff they bought, but they don\u2019t usually express gratitude for it \u2013 or they don\u2019t express it as often as they do for their experiences.\u201d<\/p>\n
In addition to experiments they conducted, the researchers found real-world evidence for this by looking at 1,200 online customer reviews, half for experiential purchases like restaurant meals and hotel stays and half for material purchases like furniture and clothing. Reviewers were more likely to spontaneously mention feeling grateful for experiential purchases than material ones.<\/p>\n
\u201cOne reason for this increased gratitude,\u201d said Walker, \u201cmay be because experiences trigger fewer social comparisons than material possessions. Consequently, experiences are more likely to foster a greater appreciation of one\u2019s own circumstances.\u201d And, the researchers write, \u201cwe suspect that people are likely to feel grateful for purchases that connect them to others, enhance their sense of self, and encourage them to appreciate what they\u2019ve purchased for its intrinsic value, not for how it compares with what others have purchased. Experiential purchases do just that.\u201d<\/p>\n
The researchers also looked at how gratitude for experiences versus material purchases affected prosocial behavior. In a study involving an economic game, they found that thinking about a meaningful experiential purchase caused participants to behave more generously toward others than when they thought about a material purchase.<\/p>\n
The kind of gratitude that participants in the studies felt from experiential purchases was more likely to be \u201cuntargeted,\u201d not attributed to someone else\u2019s actions. The researchers suggest that this kind of gratitude for an experience can result in a strong urge to somehow express that feeling in action \u2013 such as giving to others, even to anonymous others.<\/p>\n
Kumar, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Chicago, says this link between gratitude and altruistic behavior is intriguing, \u201cbecause it suggests that the benefits of experiential consumption apply not only to the consumers of those purchases themselves, but to others in their orbit as well.\u201d<\/p>\n
Gilovich, who is interested in applying insights from modern social psychology to improving peoples\u2019 lives, says this new research shows an approach that governments can take to increase the well-being of their citizens and advance societal good.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf public policy encouraged people to consume experiences rather than spending money on things, it would increase their gratitude and happiness and make them more generous as well,\u201d he said. Such policies might include funding for public parks, museums and performance spaces.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
On Thanksgiving, many of us take a moment to reflect on what we\u2019re grateful for \u2013 and we get rewards for doing so. Feeling gratitude leads to benefits like increased happiness and social cohesion, better health outcomes and even improved sleep quality. But will you get more of such benefits from that antique sofa you […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":9,"featured_media":622,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,11,6],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-619","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-general-post","8":"category-holiday","9":"category-information"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/6\/2019\/11\/phdthank3.gif","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/9"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=619"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":621,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/619\/revisions\/621"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/622"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.tntech.edu\/graduate\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}