GRATITUDE, UNDERMINING AND UNDERMINED: THE EFFECT OF GRATITUDE ON SOCIAL FEEDBACK RECEPTIVITY

Abstract

Scholarship has traditionally focused on gratitude’s benefits of improved wellbeing and prosocial outcomes. Yet, recent research has revealed gratitude’s propensity to engender non-prosocial outcomes through the social alignment function. In establishing further support for this perspective, the current paper proposes that gratitude could lead to increased receptivity to social feedback (Study 1), and this effect is influenced by the propensity to trust social others (Study 2). These predictions were explored utilizing a false-feedback paradigm, where receptivity was operationalized as one’s reported state self-esteem upon receiving bogus social feedback. Study 1 revealed that grateful participants were more receptive to negative social feedback than joyful participants. Subsequently, Study 2 demonstrated that the effect of gratitude on negative social feedback receptivity could be reduced by lowering grateful participants’ perception of the usefulness of trust. By demonstrating that grateful individuals’ self-concept are comparatively malleable in face of external evaluations, the findings contribute preliminary support for gratitude’s potential to negatively impact one’s wellbeing. This calls into question widely-held assumptions regarding the purely adaptive functions of positive emotions.