Does gratitude promote a sense of fairness and equality?

13Dec/09

Does gratitude promote a sense of fairness and equality?

Gratitude has been theorized to be a moral emotion, yet it has largely been studied for it's hedonic benefits rather than it's effect on moral reasoning. I had done some previous analyses on our data at yourmorals.org where scores on the Gratitude quotient scale were positively related to most all measures of moral reasoning. By itself, this isn't particularly interesting as there are so many possible interpretations of this. People who have nice things happen to them may feel grateful and also be nice people. Nicer, more moral people may do good things in life and may receive benefits for them, for which they are grateful. The numerous interpretations make any conclusion difficult.

As such, I decided to put a simple gratitude manipulation where participants were asked to write about something they were grateful for, before the moral foundations questionnaire. I attempted to test the effects of gratitude on moral reasoning by running an experiment where participants were asked to write about 5 things they were grateful for, 5 hassles from their life, or 5 neutral events. Below are the results of ~1500 participants. Generally, it seems gratitude makes people more morally liberal and when I examined the standard liberal/conservative moral split (Harm & Fairness minus Authority, Ingroup, & Purity), there was a marginally significant relationship (p=.06) between being in the gratitude condition and having a greater liberal split. The effect sizes are obviously small, but those in the gratitude condition appear to endorse the fairness foundation (p<.01) more and the authority foundation less (p<.05).

I'm not sure how to interpret this result. It may just be random error. To explore the result further, I looked at the individual fairness questions.

The fact that the gratitude manipulation has a fairly homogenous effect at the question level is promising. Fairness can be thought of in many different ways. It can be thought of as a concern for equality or for people not getting what they deserve. The "RICH" and "TREATED" questions appear to show the biggest effect and they are most indicative of a concern for equality (see question text below). I could imagine a theoretical argument for this link as being grateful and satisfied with a situation allows one the luxury of being generous and worrying about equal treatment. There is research indicating that being grateful motivates prosocial behavior (also see this article).

Here is a list of fairness questions:

TREATED - Whether or not some people were treated differently than others

UNFAIRLY - Whether or not someone acted unfairly

RIGHTS - Whether or not someone was denied his or her rights

FAIRLY - When the government makes laws, the number one principle should be ensuring that everyone is treated fairly.

JUSTICE - Justice is the most important requirement for a society.

RICH - I think it's morally wrong that rich children inherit a lot of money while poor children inherit nothing.

Still, I'm not 100% convinced of these results given the small effect sizes and will likely have to do more studies to confirm if this effect is replicable or is just an effect of noisy data. Another way to look at the reliability of these effects is to examine whether these effects are consistent across groups. It does appear that the effect is consistent across groups for increasing fairness.

The robustness of this effect less consistent for the Authority foundation, though it is perhaps worth considering why grateful libertarians may endorse authority less. Perhaps the only reason for libertarians to value authority is out of a sense of insecurity. For example, the libertarian party does espouse the idea that the only role of government is to provide security for property rights. If that security is provided, perhaps libertarians see no need for any authority?

I'm not sure if I have enough evidence for a paper. All research is somewhere between a zero and 1 in terms of it's conclusiveness and these results may be too preliminary to reach the somewhat arbitrary standard of paper-hood. I could clearly strengthen these results with a regression analyses of our large correlational dataset that confirms these patterns. I'll have to get feedback from more objective parties.

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Jon Haidt
December 19th, 2009 - 05:47

Ravi,
these results are so cool!
I think you can move forward in 2 ways:
1)find out what kind of people respond most to the manipulation. You’ve already looked at politics. But what about measures of warmth or emotionality: IRI, big5 agreeableness, or baron-cohen empathizer? Is this an emotion-mediated effect, or a cognitive-priming effect?

2)think about this as the opposite of the Jost/Thorisdottir fear effects; fear makes people more conservative. Maybe gratitude and fear are pushing the same mental lever in opposite directions. perhaps the next study should have a gratitude, fear, and neutral condition?

With one more study that sheds light on mechanism, i think you have a paper.

jon
Charles Iliya Krempeaux
January 1st, 2010 - 15:22

@Ravi, you said…
“[I]t is perhaps worth considering why grateful libertarians may endorse authority less. Perhaps the only reason for libertarians to value authority is out of a sense of insecurity. For example, the libertarian party does espouse the idea that the only role of government is to provide security for property rights. If that security is provided, perhaps libertarians see no need for any authority?”

I’m not completely sure that what you mean when you say “authority” is the same as what I mean when I say “authority”. (For example, do wrap the concept of “ownership” of tangible items, or land, and of one’s own body into the concept of “authority”? What I’m writing below assumes you don’t.) But let me offer a comment that might give you a bit of insight.

I have heard it claimed once that people who self-identify as “libertarian” are a union of two main groups. Group #1 is the “liberty as a goal” types. And group #2 is the “liberty as a means” types. (I think there is probably some truth to this claim. And maybe what you are seeing in the data is a result of there being these two principal components in the people who self-identify as “libertarian”.)

To elaborate a bit more, people who call themselves “libertarian” in group #1 do not accept any notion of authority in any way. To them, no matter what the moral question is, authority doesn’t matter/exist. For them, taxation is theft. A police arrest is an act of kidnapping. Etc. For them, the ends never justifies the means. They apply morality only to actions, and do it in a class-less way. (I.e., a person’s classification — like being a solider, a police officer or a judge — does not change the moral judgment of their action.) To them liberty is their goal. (And they have a very hard, precise, and immutable definition of what “liberty” means. I.e., the absence of (physical) coercion.)

To further elaborate, people who call themselves “libertarian” in group #2 see a tiny tiny amount of government as a necessary evil, and will thus only accept authority (in the form of government) when they see that evil as necessary. (I.e., they accept only a tiny tiny amount of government for things they believe must be done but could not be done any other way.) What they want is to set up tiny experimental independent societies (with their own rules, norms, laws, etc) and to have these compete each other in a Darwinian (although no violent) way. People would then be free to move between these competing societies and in a way “vote with their feet”, and in that way, (at least partially) decide the (Darwinian) “fitness” of a competing society by which of these competing societies they decide to live in.

I should point out that my observation is that these groups aren’t completely separate though. For example, people in group #1 do sometimes recognize that libertarianism can have the nice effect of facilitating this cultural evolution, but only accept it as long as everything is done in a voluntary way.

(If you found that useful, and would like any of that elaborated on, feel free to ask.)

P.S.
It would be really nice if you could add a “Preview Button” to them commenting form.
Ravi
February 20th, 2010 - 21:13

Charles…

Sorry I didn’t respond sooner, but I just wanted to say that I really like your distinction between liberty as a means and liberty as a goal. I don’t know if we have a way to differentiate the two types of people using our measures, but I’ll certainly continue to ponder that and maybe I’ll be able to find something interesting using your distinction in the future…thanks.