The Roles of Obligation and Gratitude in Explaining the Effect of Favors on Compliance

Abstract

Several studies suggest that providing a favor to a target before making a direct request for compliance is more effective than making a direct request alone. The most widely accepted explanation for this effect is that receiving favors causes beneficiaries to feel obligated to repay. Another potential explanation is that beneficiaries comply out of gratitude to the benefactor. Past conceptualizations frequently confound obligation and gratitude and no research tests these alternative explanations. We advance the study of reciprocal behavior by making conceptual distinctions between obligation and gratitude, and testing these two presumed mediating states in two experiments. Results demonstrate that obligation and gratitude can be empirically distinguished, supporting the gratitude explanation, but not the obligation explanation.

Keywords:

• Favors
• Obligation
• Gratitude
• Compliance
• Reciprocity

The authors would like to thank Mike Sunnafrank, Lisa Lindsey, Deborah Peterson-Perlman, Alan Sillars, Editor, and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments and criticisms of earlier drafts of this paper. We also thank the 12 talented and selfless confederates who spent countless hours in the lab doing favors for strangers.

Notes

This paper is based on the first author's doctoral dissertation and was presented at the International Communication Association's 54th annual convention in New Orleans, Louisiana, May 2004.

1. Given the normative power implied by the obligation explanation it is possible that obligation is experienced as a more self-interested awareness (an implication tested by Whatley et al., 1999). People might experience obligation as a pressure to comply with social norms. Also, people might experience obligation as a pressure from self-interested motives (e.g., it seems necessary to establish or maintain a positive image or to ensure future favors). If obligation is largely self-interested, the pure measure of obligation could miss how respondents experience obligation. Thus, we added a measure of self-interested obligation in Experiment 2 (e.g., “I was worried that people would think I was a bad person if I did not do something in return”). The roles of obligation and gratitude remain unchanged both when obligation is replaced with self-interested obligation and when self-interested obligation is included as a third, independent predictor of compliance in the model.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ryan Goei

Ryan Goei is at the Department of Communication, University of Minnesota Duluth

Franklin J. Boster

Franklin J. Boster is at the Department of Communication, Michigan State University