Why Gratitude?

In 2017, heartbroken and eyeballs deep in despair, I started searching for things for which to be grateful. I asked myself the question asked by poet Katie Farris

“Why write love poetry in a burning world? To train myself, in the midst of a burning world, to offer poems of love to a burning world.”

I reached out to people who — in the way in which they live — write love poems to our burning world. I cast my net far and wide amongst my heroes — those I knew personally and those who teach us all by their example. I invited artists, philosophers, psychologists, politicians, professors, yogis, writers, clergy, and others into a dialogue about gratitude. I am deeply grateful to those who said yes. Read more about my gratitude project methodology here.

Anthony Ahrens

“My continuing interests include gratitude and mindfulness, especially the relation of gratitude to the desire to be independent of others. I also have two relatively new interests. (1) Non-Buddhist contemplative practices. Many ancient traditions have forms of contemplation, and those outside the Buddhist tradition seem to me understudied. My student Milly Curlee and I have a first paper on the Ignatian Examen, an exercise developed by Catholicism’s Jesuits, accepted into press at Journal of Positive Psychology. (2) Moral psychology: (a) I have become interested in the integration of social cognitive theory and virtue theory. A grant is permitting me to do initial empirical work on this topic. A previous grant from the Templeton Foundation allowed me to write a paper, published in Social and Personality Psychology Compass, arguing for that integration. (b) My student Ryan Smout and I are beginning to study the consequences arising from witnessing others violating our sense of morality.  My interests, and the work of the lab, are described in more detail at my lab page, the Emotions and Positive Psychology Lab — Emotions and Positive Psychology Lab” — Anthony Ahrens, American University Website

Anthony Ahrens Gratitude Interview — January 22, 2018

KSC: What brought you to a research agenda that includes gratitude? 

AA: A couple of different things. One is just the observation that there’s so much of a development of a sense of entitlement among many people. And I started to reflect on that and think about what might, in the long run, be something of an antidote to a psychology of entitlement. And it seemed to me that gratitude would be a natural sort of antidote. 

The other is that some years ago, Martin Seligman ended up developing this positive psychology movement, which existed to some degree before that, but he really supercharged it. There was an interest in the Positive Psychology Movement and what human strengths are and how we might end up focusing some of our research on that. And in thinking about that, I thought about gratitude as a strength. And it’s really those two things that I think move me towards it.

KSC: And was that an early career thing that you have developed in your agenda, or did you come to that after an early interest in more broad or other topics? 

AA: This was more mid-career. My early career research focused on studying depression. And it’s interesting, Seligman is sort of an intellectual grandfather. My undergraduate and postdoctoral mentors were both his doctoral students. Seligman’s original work was on depression, and he came later to positive psychology. And somehow, I ended up taking some of the same path.

KSC: What does your current work involve? What are you currently researching? 

AA: On the gratitude front, what I’m most interested in right now is the ways in which wanting to be independent, that is wanting not to depend on others, wanting other people not to depend on us, the ways in which that might interfere with gratitude.

If we ask people to list things they’re grateful for. If we ask people to write letters to other people expressing their gratitude. What are the effects? And it looks like there are several effects. They’re a little bit small, though. And that doesn’t mean they’re bad. And talking to people when they start doing gratitude exercises, I’ve heard sort of a mixed bag. For some, it’s awfully hard. And that can be the case for a lot of reasons.

I started to think maybe for people who really are focused on their own independence, gratitude will not be particularly welcome. So across three studies, we found that people who really were focused on being independent valued gratitude less. They had more negative attitudes towards it. If you ask ideally, what emotions would they have, they don’t want to have as much gratitude. And they don’t experience gratitude as an emotion as much.

A paper that I’m writing right now is on the distinction between being grateful to and being grateful for. 

KSC: That is a great question. What are your current musings on that? 

AA: To understand that. A lot of what I do. Let me back up a little bit more. Psychologists who are working on gratitude mean a lot of different things by gratitude. Let me distinguish three. One is sort of gratitude exercises. There’s lots of work on what happens if you ask in different ways for people to be grateful. A second is expressions of gratitude. What happens if you tell other people, “Thank you”, in different ways. Nisteria Alger is one of the people working on that and her theory is that gratitude is about finding, reminding, and binding. It lets us know who a trustworthy relationship partner is, reminds ourselves of those people, and then binding us to people that we can trust in a relationship. That’s great and interesting stuff. I’m doing work mostly in a third area, which is gratitude as an emotion. It’s one thing for me to feel gratitude and then perhaps when I act on it.

And that’s where my focus is, where Sarah is looking more at what happens when we express gratitude. The way that I think about emotion is that we’re constantly… This word might be off-putting, but we’re constantly sort of judging what’s out there. I’m judging it as a favorable thing, and I have particular emotions as a result of that judgment. Now, emotion to this perspective prepares us to action.

We’re familiar with the fight and flight stuff. If I see that there’s a threat and I can’t cope with it, and I judge that I can’t cope with it, my body prepares me to get out, to run away. If I see that there’s something I don’t like, somebody else has caused it, and I can actually do something about it, I might experience the emotion of anger, and I might try to remove this obstacle that is in the path.

We’re judging the world in relationship to our motivations, and the result of that judgment prepares us to act. When we’re looking at the world there can be these good things that we have that we don’t really feel that we deserve. Sometimes what we focus on is the source of that. We can say “Hey, it’s my friends or my parents or whoever who did this thing for me.” And in that case, I’m feeling this gratitude to this person or these people.

And I’m not the first to suggest this, but I think a lot of folks would suggest that then we want to give back, that in some way, I want to do something for the people who have given me undeserved goodness. Other times we’re not focused on who did it, we’re focused on the fact of it. I like to think about days at the beach, and you’re just sitting there, and the sky is blue, the sun is warm, the waves are lapping up against the ocean, and you might just feel grateful for being there. And you don’t really have anybody in mind for that. It’s just that you didn’t particularly do anything to deserve this beauty, but it’s there. 

It seems different from when we ask people to be grateful to. We asked some people to be grateful to people every day for a couple of weeks, and other people we asked to be grateful for something every day for a couple of weeks. And when we’re asking them to be grateful for, they seem to want to do different things, but we didn’t get a very clear picture about exactly what. My hunch is that it’s more about celebration and appreciation of abundance, as opposed to appreciation of the benefactor and the connectedness.

KSC: The word that comes to mind as I’m hearing you describe, the word presence, being present to the moment, and grateful for the moment. 

AA: In the psych literature, I’ve published also in Mindfulness, and I’ve had a mindfulness practice for about 20 years or so now. It’s hard, because when we talk about mindfulness, in psychology, at least, we’re saying many different things. When one person uses the word, they mean something very differently from somebody else.

The way that I make sense of it is to think about mindfulness practices helping us to be present. And then once we’re present, we can notice that there are these things that are undeserved goodnesses. I don’t have any data to support that, but it’s my working model of how it happens.

KSC: That’s interesting. You would characterize gratitude as an aspect of mindful, a possible, I don’t want to use the word, by-product, but… 

AA: By-product is not bad. When I think about it, so let’s start with what I’m thinking about with gratitude.

If gratitude is my judgment that something is an undeserved goodness, then I can ask myself, what helps me do that? What helps me to realize that there’s undeserved goodness in my life? And my working model is that the practice of mindfulness can put us in a spot where we can start to notice those undeserved goodnesses. But that’s sort of how I’m approaching it. Talk to somebody else doing mindfulness and you might find a very different expression of what’s going on.

KSC: Sure. Sure. Even gratitude, like you said earlier, gratitude is defined so differently and understood so differently.

AA: That was a recurring theme [at a recent conference] that people were just using gratitude differently, and we need to be very clear about our meanings when we use the word. 

KSC: Having a clear definition will help us. What are some of the most positive impacts of maintaining a gratitude practice? 

AA: If we define it clearly, then we can understand some of the impacts.

KSC: Yes. And some of the results of being grateful, of grateful living. What do you think are some of the impacts? 

AA: Okay. I’m going to do my careful psychologist hedge for a second. Okay. We’re new at this game. We’ve really only been studying gratitude interventions for maybe about 15 years or so. And that’s the blink of the eye in doing research on psych interventions. It takes a while to really figure out what it is you’re doing and how to study it.

And one of the other implications of it being new is it’s really possible that the long-term effects are different from short-term. It could be that … Let me do an analogy. Let’s imagine instead of talking about the effects of gratitude, we were talking about the effects of a drug.

It could well be that the effects of the drug would depend on the dosage, different dosages, different effects. It could depend on the condition. The drug will affect some people one way and different people a different way.

And it could be that the drug would have different effects over time. It might have one effect in the short run and a different one on the long run. To figure out the effect of a drug, you’d have to work for a long time to look at all of it.

I don’t really think that we’re there yet with gratitude. I think there’s good evidence that in the short run, practicing gratitude, reflecting on things you’re grateful for or writing letters of gratitude to people who have really profoundly gifted us in our lives, that at least in the short run, that can do things like boosting our positive mood and reducing our negative mood. 

But I’m really interested in both looking over a longer period of time than we’ve been able so far, looking at larger dosages than we have so far, and also looking at the circumstances under which gratitude will have different effects. Let me talk dosage for a second. A lot of the studies in which we’re doing studies of gratitude will ask people to keep track of things they’re grateful for, for maybe a few weeks. And its promising research, but I’m curious, what would happen if we have regular gratitude practice over the course of years? We can’t really know until we do that, and we see what the effects are. And I also start thinking about different gratitude interventions.

I’m coming at gratitude through this view of emotion. We feel grateful when there’s an undeserved goodness. One of the things I wonder, and I could be wrong, and I don’t have any data on this, is whether if we repeatedly practice reflecting on the undeserved goodness in our lives, that will shift that sense of entitlement that I talked about. Will we start to see people lead lives in which entitlement is not so important to them? That’s going to be a really hard problem to tackle methodologically. I don’t know that we’ll have a good answer for a long time on that.

KSC: A thought that comes to mind in hearing aspects of entitlement, what role does age plays in that? Because if your participant was a teenager and you followed the teenager from 15 to 30 and saw how different that would be versus following a 50-year-old to 65.

AA: That would be interesting. That would be important.

KSC: Building on your earlier thoughts, is there a relationship between gratitude and entitlement?

AA: I’m betting that there is. I am a cautious scientist, at least I try to be. I don’t know anybody who has really measured that directly.

My intuition is that there will be. And part of that goes back to this idea that we’re always appraising or judging our environments. And I think if our appraisals can be about other people being responsible for good things in our lives, that’s going to be really different from judging that we are responsible for those good things in our lives.

My bet is that the appraisal that we are responsible for the good things of our lives, that we’ve lifted ourselves up by our own bootstraps, will lead to emotions that lend themselves to a sense of entitlement. Whereas if we practice reflecting on undeserved goodness, then where’s the entitlement? It’s hard for me to think about entitlement in that space because we live in a context of gift. 

And right as you were speaking, there are all kinds of cultural and contextual implications to that. Our country is so individualist and the bootstraps and that kind of thing. In other cultures, there seems to be a different cultural lens for gratitude. And that’s my bet and we will see.

But yes, one of my interests is certainly the sort of psychology of the free market where the logic is, okay, so what you have, you have a certain set of resources and you trade them for other resources and that’s what makes the world go around, which is really useful in some circumstances, but it creates a mindset that is about exchange rather than a mindset that is about gift. I wonder about the ways in which a culture in which messages are routinely about market processes crowd out the complimentary sorts of messages about gift.

KS: Our capacity to understand a gift versus [the market] that’s interesting. It’s very interesting.

KS: Can people learn to be grateful?

AA: The way that we’ll know is to collect the data and see. I think the work being done on these short-term exercises of gratitude listing and writing letters is promising and suggests that at least to a degree. Yes, we can learn to be more grateful. … 

I would be very surprised if we can’t learn gratitude. If we go back to this idea that we start looking for different things and the things we’re looking for give rise to different emotional experience, we ought to be able to train people to look for different things. … You develop a capacity for looking. …

I think that we can be expert, become more expert as we grow. And that can involve looking at the world differently. I’m interested in the long run in the sort of contemplative practices that build that.

One of my next ventures will be looking at non-Buddhist contemplative practices. It’s very exciting. I have a mindfulness practice that is vaguely derived from Tibetan Buddhism, and I’ve been doing it for a lot of years.And in psychology, we’ve had a great deal of attention to Buddhist contemplative practices to mindfulness. There’s great work being done now on loving-kindness meditation. But there are other traditions that also have their forms of contemplative practice. I have a couple of links into Catholic contemplative practices and in particular practices developed by the Jesuits the order of Catholicism that formed of Pope Francis. 

KSC: I am thinking of the Prayer of Examine. 

AA: Exactly. The Examine is one of the things that I’m hoping to study very soon. There’s a program for training people to be spiritual directors in Ignatian practices. For that, they lead people through eight-week practices, and I’m hoping that we’ve got a tentative agreement to start studying that in the next month or so. I will mention, I am also Catholic and did the Ignatian exercises about the same time as I was starting the mindfulness practices.

KSC: I took a prayer class years ago, and that’s where I was exposed to the Prayer of Examine, and gratitude, and mindfulness. It’s interesting how paths lead us in a similar direction.

AA: That’s fascinating. Yeah, that Prayer of Examine is powerful stuff. Powerful stuff if you do that.

KSC: Looking at your early career, is there a connection between gratitude and depression? Because those magic pill things keep being discussed. [Can] gratitude can help with depression? Can gratitude help with connection? All of those things.

AA: Let me talk about the work context, and then I’ll circle back to depression. On the work front, I want to go to this sort of interpersonal focus that Sarah Webb and others working on the interpersonal functions of gratitude talk about. What Sarah suggests is that if I feel and express gratitude towards someone, that will build a trusting relationship between us. I have heard people start to look at gratitude in the workplace. The principle, I would think, would be that for work to go well, it helps a lot to have good trusting relationships.

Having ways in which you can really feel genuine gratitude, that is not sort of manipulated gratitude, but genuine gratitude towards your coworkers, and then build those trusting relationships. Work is going to be much more of a joy. This isn’t any sort of psychological proof, but I can say one of the things that makes my work a joy is that I have some colleagues around here to whom I’m very grateful and who I trust, and I think that we’ve reciprocally built up those relationships over the years.

I’m betting that that will be helpful, and you can start thinking about that relationship of gratitude at work as opposed to relationship of competition at work. It ought to spur productivity, but if your productivity is coming through competition, it’s going to look different if your productivity is coming as a result of building gratitude. 

Sarah and her students presented some beautiful work on the witnessing effect of gratitude. What they do is have you see someone else express gratitude to a third party, and that by itself seems to have some positive effects for the person who is witnessed at, that then they do more good for this person who has expressed gratitude.

That said, when I think about gratitude, I think about two things that are going on. One is you realize, at least in some gratitude, that there is this entity that did this thing for you. A second one, and this is sort of more the gratitude for that, that you realize that your life is abundant, either to those who have helped us or to other people who haven’t. If our appraisals tend to be focused instead on stuff we’ve done, there’s going to be less of an inclination to service. What’s the locus? Why do good things happen in our lives? To some extent, they happen because of us.