Writing About Gratitude Toward God Produces Differential Content and Outcomes Compared to Gratitude Toward Other Benefactors Among U.S. Adults

ABSTRACT

We test the effectiveness of 2 different written inductions of gratitude toward God and analyze the content and outcomes of these gratitude expressions. We recruited 1,170 predominantly Christian U.S. participants across 3 CloudResearch datasets. Participants were randomly assigned to write about gratitude to God or another benefactor, including people, parents, country, and unspecified benefactors, or to write about their daily activities. Study 2 further probed nuances related to control group instructions, and Study 3 examined outcome measures related to well-being and prosociality. The participants who wrote about gratitude toward God more frequently mentioned basic needs and self-transcendence and less frequently mentioned material items compared to other benefactors. They also showed high levels of expansive emotions and religious intentions. Our research provides methodological insights relevant to gratitude writing inductions and sheds light on the content and outcomes of gratitude toward God.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are openly available on the Open Science Framework at https://osf.io/9xjgz/?view_only=b4ac3dcf2ed1467fab2ece33c136cd14

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10508619.2023.2192106

Notes

1. We inferred that those participants who noted in the gratitude toward God condition that they did not believe in God were alerting us to the fact that the exercise was not meaningful to them. Therefore, we omitted their data from analyses. Results were similar when these participants were included in analyses. We did not omit participants who simply indicated in the demographics that they did not believe in God because research suggests that prior religious belief can have residual effects on present behavior (Van Tongeren et al., 2020). Instead, we used belief in God as a covariate.

2. Ideally, we would like to have examined belief in God as a moderator; however, there were too few people who self-reported disbelief for us to run moderation analyses. Please see Supplemental Table 6 for analyses that excluded people who did not believe in God.

3. We thank an anonymous reviewer for suggesting this confound.

Additional information

Funding

The preparation of this article was supported by a grant from the John Templeton Foundation (#61513). The opinions expressed in this publication are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the John Templeton Foundation.