The Nature of Gratitude

Gratitude is the primary response to the recognition that one has received gifts and benefits from another. It is an affirmation of goodness in conjunction with recognizing that the good is sourced outside of oneself. When grateful, a person responds to a benefit by avowing its goodness, apprehending it as flowing from a source beyond his or her own agency, and desiring to reciprocate the goodness received. As the positive emotional response to benevolence, gratitude is perhaps the quintessential positive trait, an amplifier of goodness in oneself, the world, and others.

Throughout history, the concept of gratitude has been seen as central to the smooth running of society, being a mainstay of philosophical and religious accounts of living, leading it to be deemed “not only the greatest of the virtues, but the parent of all others” (Cicero, 1851). Loder (2006) noted, “Gratitude affects how a person conceives the world and expects others to behave. It increases interpersonal receptivity. It seeps into one’s being and affects all dispositions pervasively” (p. 176). One-half century earlier, famed sociologist Georg Simmel declared that gratitude is “the moral memory of mankind.” If every grateful action, he went on to say, were suddenly eliminated, society itself would crumble.

Gratitude is a multidimensional construct that manifests in personal and interpersonal contexts. Several researchers define gratitude as a complex social emotion with an inherent attribution, noting that gratitude typically involves a benefit and benefactor (McAdams & Bauer, 2004; McCullough & Tsang, 2004). Roberts (2004) describes the dynamics of gratitude as inherently relational. The reciprocity implied in giving and receiving facilitates and sustains social and intimate relationships of all kinds. Hlava (2010) highlights the relational and communicative context between giver and receiver as essential to the experience of gratitude. Gratitude is also conceptualized as a moral emotion that operates at the intersection of the social and cognitive emotions, drawing upon a wide range of feelings states, values, and judgments (Buck, 2004), which conceptualization provides supporting evidence of the inherently empathic nature of gratitude. Several researchers portray gratitude as an empathic emotion, asserting that the giving of a gift requires the giver to place himself or herself in the position of the recipient (Fredrickson, 2004; Lazarus & Lazarus, 1994). In Ricoeur’s (2005) definition of gratitude as “recognition,” gratitude is not focused on reciprocity, but rather on mutuality. Additionally, Buck (2004) identified the gratitude of exchange and the gratitude of caring as lenses through which to understand the nature of gratitude.

A declaration of appreciation for some act of kindness received may thus function as a reliable signal of a person’s inclination to cooperate with others in everyday exchanges. The function of gratitude is to motivate the formation and strengthening of mutually beneficial relationships by signaling to another that he or she is valued. Thus, communities that hope to maintain cooperative relations are likely to institute clear prescriptive norms for expressing gratitude. Individuals who express gratitude when they receive benefits are rewarded in various ways. In turn, those who fail to express gratitude may suffer reputational penalties. Ungrateful people are likely to be perceived as both low in competence, because they required assistance, and low in warmth, because their ingratitude violates cooperative norms and these perceptions arouse intense feelings of contempt. Gratitude may indeed be the parent of the virtues, but ingratitude is a universally powerful accusation and qualifies as “king of the vices.”