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Title: | THANK ME AND YOU SHALL HARM THEM: THE EFFECTS OF GRATITUDE ON OBEDIENCE TO UNDERMINE OTHERS | Authors: | LEOW JIAN WEI | Keywords: | gratitude obedience social alignment social influence |
Issue Date: | 20-Apr-2020 | Citation: | LEOW JIAN WEI (2020-04-20). THANK ME AND YOU SHALL HARM THEM: THE EFFECTS OF GRATITUDE ON OBEDIENCE TO UNDERMINE OTHERS. ScholarBank@NUS Repository. | Abstract: | Past research suggested that gratitude encourages prosocial behaviours to improve others’ welfare, but this paper aims to illuminate an underexplored drawback of gratitude. Drawing upon the social alignment function of gratitude which posits that gratitude heightens the tendency to follow social cues, this study postulates that grateful people will be more obedient to undermine a person even if such acts would remove opportunities from that person; thereby contradicting the traditional view that gratitude inspires prosociality. In a between-subject design, participants were induced to feel either gratitude, joy, or neutral towards the experimenter. After being subjected to an evaluation task in which they understood that their evaluation would influence an applicant’s scholarship outcome, participants were ordered to evaluate more harshly by the experimenter and their comments on the evaluation sheet served as the obedience measure. Results concur with the hypothesis; grateful participants were more punitive and less benevolent in their evaluation than joyful and neutral participants. The findings support the social alignment theory and revealed that the increased propensity to obey to undermine others was specific to gratitude and not general positive affect. Consequently, the present study enables a more holistic understanding of gratitude. | URI: | https://scholarbank.nus.edu.sg/handle/10635/176683 |
Appears in Collections: | Bachelor's Theses |
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