Rewarding valuable services and altruistic motives: gratitude and pay for essential workers during the Covid-19 pandemic

ABSTRACT

Two studies examine whether a social-cognitive model of appraisal predicts gratitude toward workers deemed “essential” by the UK government during the Covid-19 response. Gratitude was predicted by appraisals of how essential work was, how costly and whether workers were contributing out of a genuine desire to help, and in turn predicted judgments of how much workers should earn. In a second experimental study support is found for the novel prediction that gratitude is systematically higher for lower-paid workers. The data extends the model and applies it to self-reported gratitude toward remote and unidentified workers during a period of crisis.

KEYWORDS:

• Gratitude
• social-cognitive
• appraisals
• income
• Covid-19

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data described in this article are openly available in the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/ecd49.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data, Open Materials and Preregistered. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/ecd49.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/00224545.2022.2144708

Additional information

Funding

The authors reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.