Gratitude inhibits competitive behaviour in threatening interactions

ABSTRACT

It is well established that gratitude favours prosocial tendencies in neutral and amicable social interactions. Less is clear, however, about the role of gratitude in threatening situations that breed competitive impulses. As gratitude inhibits self-centred impulses and motivates a communal orientation, we predict and demonstrate that gratitude reduces competitive behaviour in threatening interactions. In Study 1 (N = 171), after emotion induction, participants went through the classic Trucking game paradigm, whereby a bogus opponent behaved in a competitive manner (i.e. closing the gate on them). Gratitude, as compared to joy and a neutral mood state, reduced participants’ competitive behaviour against the opponent. In Study 2 (N = 422), after losing to a bogus opponent on a self-relevant task, participants were given an opportunity to sabotage the opponent’s chances of winning a lottery. Individuals induced to feel gratitude showed less sabotaging behaviour than those in a neutral mood state. Importantly, this effect was only observed against a highly competitive, but not a neutral, opponent, suggesting that gratitude inhibits competitive behaviour only under high threat. Our findings suggest that gratitude is instrumental in arresting the competitive cycles from developing in threatening social interactions.

KEYWORDS:

• Gratitude
• competitive behavior
• prosocial behavior
• threatening social interactions
• positive emotion

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Participants’ gate usage could also be regarded as count data, and Poisson regression or negative binomial regression would be more appropriate to analyse count data. However, participants’ gate usage did not follow a Poisson distribution or a negative binomial distribution, as the variance (0.72) was much smaller than the mean (2.33). The likelihood ratio test further showed that neither the Poisson model (χ² = 3.11, df = 2, p = .211) nor the negative binomial model (χ² = .934, df = 2, p = .627) fit the data.

2 Past research has found that making available the opportunity to obstruct the opponent in the Trucking game is sufficient to spontaneously evoke competitive tendencies (Deutsch & Krauss, 1962). This suggests that gratitude may be capable of reducing competitive behaviour even against the non-competitive Player 1. This was indeed the case, albeit with smaller effects. Planned contrasts revealed that gratitude reduced competitive behaviour as compared to the joy and neutral mood conditions, β = −1.17, SE = 0.60, p = .05, OR = 0.31, 95% CI [.10, 1.00], but no difference was found between joy and neutral mood conditions, β = .06, SE = 0.35, p = .87, OR = 1.06, 95% CI [.53, 2.12]. Nonetheless, we focused on competitive behaviour against the competitive Player 2 as the threat has stronger a priori theoretical basis.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by Start-Up Grant, Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, National University of Singapore [grant number R-581-000-165-133], awarded to the second author.