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Abstract
People feel grateful when they have benefited from someone's costly, intentional, voluntary effort on their behalf. Experiencing gratitude motivates beneficiaries to repay their benefactors and to extend generosity to third parties. Expressions of gratitude also reinforce benefactors for their generosity. These social features distinguish gratitude from related emotions such as happiness and feelings of indebtedness. Evolutionary theories propose that gratitude is an adaptation for reciprocal altruism (the sequential exchange of costly benefits between nonrelatives) and, perhaps, upstream reciprocity (a pay-it-forward style distribution of an unearned benefit to a third party after one has received a benefit from another benefactor). Gratitude therefore may have played a unique role in human social evolution.
Recommended Reading
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Emmons, R.A., McCullough, M.E. (Eds.). (2001). The psychology of gratitude. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Company. A readable collection of chapters on gratitude by leading scholars in philosophy, the social sciences, and the life sciences. Google Scholar | |
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McCullough, M.E., Kilpatrick, S.D., Emmons, R.A., Larson, D.B. (2001). (See References). A more leisurely and wide-ranging review of research and theory on gratitude through the end of the 20th century. Google Scholar | |
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Nowak, M., Roch, S. (2006). (See References). An important introduction to the logic and evolutionary plausibility of natural selection for upstream reciprocity. Google Scholar | |
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Trivers, R.L. (1971). (See References). A landmark theoretical work that provides a blueprint of the psychological system that might have supported the evolution of reciprocal altruism in humans. Google Scholar |
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