The Psychology of Gratitude

385 Pages·2004·2.38 MB·English

by  Robert A. Emmons, Michael E. McCullough

The Psychology of
Gratitude
ROBERT A. EMMONS
MICHAEL E. MCCULLOUGH,
Editors
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
The Psychology of Gratitude
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The psychology of gratitude / edited by Robert A. Emmons and Michael E. McCullough
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-515010-4
1. Gratitude. I. Emmons, Robert A. II. McCullough, Michael E.
BF575.G68 P79 2003
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Foreword
Robert C. Solomon
So after every case, you have to go up to somebody and say “thank
you”? What a . . . nightmare.
—My Cousin Vinny (Launer, Schiff, & Lynn, 1992)
Gratitude is one of the most neglected emotions and one of the
most underestimated of the virtues. In most accounts of the emotions, it re-
ceives nary a mention. Even in broader surveys of the attitudes, it is often ig-
nored.And in the most prominent lists of the virtues, notably Aristotle’s, it is
not included. Gratitude is often included, of course, in Christian treatises on
the virtues, but then it is usually directed only toward a single if exceptional
object, namely God the Almighty.And yet gratitude is one of those responses
that seems essential to and among civilized human beings, and perhaps it is
even significant among some social animals, as de Waal and others have per-
suasively shown.
The neglect of gratitude is, in itself, interesting.Why does it not come to
mind immediately when the social emotions and virtues are in question?
Why should we be loathe to admit that we feel and should feel indebted to
someone who is our benefactor and has helped us in some way? This way of
describing the emotion is already a clue.We (especially in this society) do not
like to think of ourselves as indebted.We would rather see our good fortunes
as our own doing (whereas the losses and sufferings are not our fault), thus
the neglect of gratitude. Like the emotion of trust (to which it is closely
akin), it involves an admission of our vulnerability and our dependence on
vi f o r e w o r d
other people. Thus gratitude lies at the very heart of ethics. It is more basic,
perhaps, than even duty and obligation.
The neglect of gratitude as an emotion might be partially explained by
the fact that it is obviously what Hume called a “calm passion,” with none of
the vehemence and drama of the “violent” passions. There is gushing grati-
tude, to be sure, but such behavior is hardly the norm, even in cases where
the boon is enormous and one’s gratitude is appropriately expansive. Usually,
even when one is grateful to someone for saving one’s life, gratitude is better
expressed through a quiet thanks and an appreciative silence, followed (usu-
ally after a decent interval) by an appropriate gift or return favor.
Gratitude is thus a poor candidate for a basic emotion or affect program
of the sort that have been prominently defended by many recent psycholo-
gists (e.g., Paul Ekman) and philosophers (e.g., Paul Griffiths). As far as we
know, it displays no regular or recognizable facial expression; leads to no sin-
gle sort of hardwired behavioral response; and cannot plausibly be traced,
much less reduced, to any particular neurological processes. Also, gratitude
endures. It is not, as Carroll Izard defined emotion, a “brief . . . response”
(Izard, 2002, p. 248) If it is just a fleeting feeling, it hardly counts as gratitude.
And gratitude, unlike hardwired behavioral responses, can be appropriate or
inappropriate. Gratitude should be sincere.
Perhaps, on occasion, gratitude may feel good, and we do speak of heart-
felt gratitude, but I think the more usual feeling is one of slight discomfort
(for reasons suggested previously) or, often, nothing at all. We may say that
we feel grateful in describing or expressing our gratitude, but this is not usu-
ally a phenomenological report of a unique kind of experience. (Most emo-
tions, I argue, lack any specific feeling in this sense. Our phenomenological
reports more likely consist of various perspectival and value-laden descrip-
tions of the situation and objects of our emotion.) Some theorists (e.g., Paul
Griffiths) might include gratitude among our higher cognitive emotions, if,
that is, it were to count as an emotion at all. But emotions comprise a varied
and expansive category in which all sorts of feelings are included, and it
seems to me that excluding gratitude too readily suggests that gratitude isn’t
“felt” at all. But to say this is to suggest that gratitude is just a social perform-
ance, like unthinkingly saying “thank you” when the waiter brings some extra
pads of butter to the table.
As for the virtues, gratitude is not as active as most (courage and gen-
erosity, for instance), nor is it an ongoing disposition to behave in a socially
responsible or congenial manner (temperance and truthfulness, for exam-
ple). We do not usually think of it as being cultivated as a habit (although
some of its superficial trappings, such as saying “thank you,” obviously may
be), and (like many virtues) its status as a virtue as opposed to an emotion is
in much dispute. (Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, opposed the virtues,
f o r e w o r d vii
which he insisted were “states of character,” to the passions, which he consid-
ered merely episodic. Many philosophers have followed him in this; for ex-
ample, Bernard Williams in his 1985 Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.)
But it is not always easy to distinguish between a dispositional state of
character and a recurring passion, and (as Aristotle clearly argued) it is as nec-
essary to cultivate the right passions as it is to cultivate the right habits and
states of character. Both are essential to virtue. Indeed, they are often identi-
cal. Cultivating courage, for example, is cultivating the right amount of and
the right attitude to fear, and cultivating generosity is cultivating the right
amount of and the right attitude to sympathy or compassion. It may be that
when we speak of a grateful person (or a grateful nation) we are more often
referring to a particular episode rather than a consistent state of character.
But it does not follow that gratitude cannot be cultivated, or that it has noth-
ing to do with character. Indeed, a single feeling of gratitude—for example, to
one’s parents, to an influential teacher or guru, or to someone who has seri-
ous changed or even saved one’s life—may come to define a good deal of
one’s character and one’s sense of one’s own life.
By contrast, being ungrateful is clearly the mark of a vice, whether in a
single instance or as a long-term defect of character. Where gratitude is ap-
propriate, even mandatory, being ungrateful is a sign or symptom of lack of
socialization, whether evident in the inability to appreciate what others have
done for one or, worse, the grudging resentment of one’s own vulnerability
and the refusal to admit one’s debt to others. Gratitude directed to God may
not be demeaning. After all, it is God we are acknowledging as our benefac-
tor. But gratitude toward other people may be more of a problem. A decade
or so ago, the late social psychologist Shula Sommers studied attitudes to-
ward gratitude (and other emotions) in U.S. and Israeli society. She found
that Americans in general ranked gratitude comparatively low on a scale of
comfortable and uncomfortable emotions and that U.S. men, in general,
found gratitude to be a humiliating emotion (Sommers, 1984). But uncom-
fortable though it may be, we recognize that none of us is wholly self-suffi-
cient and without the need of help from others.To deny that obvious truth is
not just to be philosophically mistaken: It is to be a person of poor character,
whatever one’s other virtues.
Which is not to say that gratitude is good in itself, as philosophers say,
and as many of the authors in this book are well aware.As Aristotle said of all
of the passions, it is appropriateness that counts—the right passion, in the
right circumstance, with the right target, to the right degree. Thus Aristotle
talked about perception as the key to ethics, the practiced ability to see in a
situation the appropriateness (or the inappropriateness) not only of grati-
tude but of its specific expression. There are occasions in which gratitude is
inappropriate despite the benefit. (I have heard people say that gratitude is
viii f o r e w o r d
inappropriate if someone is just doing his or her job, although I suspect that
this is just an excuse not to thank them.) There are occasions on which grati-
tude is appropriate even though the benefit in question is slight indeed. (I
would argue that the waiter bringing the butter is one modest example.)
Sometimes the best expression of gratitude is a slight nod of the head. Some-
times nothing less than pledging one’s life will do. Both Seneca and Adam
Smith spent considerable time discussing the question of appropriateness,
but the point to be made is that the matter of appropriateness is one that es-
capes the confines of psychology and moves to manners and ethics.
I argue, as do many of the authors in this book, that being capable of and
expressing gratitude is not only a virtue but part and parcel of the good life. It
is not just an acknowledgment of debt and an expression of humility but is
also a way to improve one’s life. One can take one’s life and its advantages for
granted, but how much better it is to acknowledge not only these advantages
but one’s gratitude for them. Thus Barbara Fredrickson rightly argues that
gratitude broadens and builds. It is not just a positive view of life. It is a way of
putting one’s life in perspective. Ultimately, as Nietzsche (1967) exclaimed
in one of his most heartfelt aphorisms, one should be grateful for one’s life as
such (“How could I fail to be grateful to my whole life?”—Ecce Homo, “Why
I Am So Clever,” section 10, p. 221). A person who feels such cosmic grati-
tude, even if just on occasion, is a better person and a happier one.
But one of the questions that has always intrigued me about such cosmic
gratitude, and it certainly bothered Nietzsche as well, is to whom should one
feel this gratitude?
As an emotion (as opposed to a mood or a mere state of character), grat-
itude is defined, at least in part, by its object. But the object (in this case one’s
whole life) seems to be incomplete. If a good friend gives me a book, I am not
just grateful for the book; I am grateful to him for giving me the book. This
acknowledgment of the other’s agency seems essential to the emotion. But if
one does not believe in God, then how can one be grateful for one’s life and
all of its blessings? Nietzsche talks rather obscurely about affirming one’s life,
but this seems to rather beg the question. To whom should one be grateful for
one’s life? Robert C. Roberts has no problem with this question, nor do most
Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Muslims. But I do, as do some Buddhists, who
may well share the problem with atheists.
Being grateful “to the universe” is a limp way out of this quandary. But
personifying the universe solves the God problem only by displacing it.Thus
Camus (1946), another atheist, populates his hero Sisyphus’s world with
gods and goddesses who are maliciously enjoying his fate (and at whom he
can rail in scorn and defiance). But this literary ploy is part and parcel of
Camus’s own recognition that the universe cannot be, as he so often claims,
merely indifferent. (Indeed, he gives the game away when he has his antihero
f o r e w o r d ix
Meursault “open his heart to the benign indifference of the universe” at the
end of The Stranger) (emphasis added). But does it make sense to be grateful
to the universe? I can imagine Dr. Roberts saying, “Isn’t this really being grate-
ful to God without admitting it?”
Perhaps one can avoid God by claiming to be thankful to chance, or per-
haps to luck, as one might be thankful in roulette or the state lottery (one is
surely not thankful to the casino or to the state). But, again, the effort seems
limp. The “to whom?” question gets begged again. Manufacturing an evasive
impersonal agent to whom to be grateful does not seem convincing. But,
then, are atheists stuck with being ungrateful about the single gift that mat-
ters most?
Rather, I think the “to whom?” question is misplaced here. The easy
move from gratitude as an interpersonal social emotion to cosmic gratitude
for one’s whole life is unwarranted. It may make good sense for a theist, for
whom there is something akin to an interpersonal relationship with God
(but even the most powerful author on this topic, the Danish existentialist
Søren Kierkegaard, expressed deep anxiety about the peculiar one-sidedness
of this particular interpersonal relationship).And one can, of course, person-
ify the universe as Camus did, but it is instructive that Camus felt compelled
to belittle science (and the scientific worldview) at the same time. But I think
that there is another solution, more radical in that it severs gratitude for one’s
life from the interpersonal emotions. It is, I think, still gratitude, but it shines
a light on what even interpersonal gratitude is all about, which is not merely
being thankful to X for boon or gift Y.
Gratitude should not be conceived just in terms of a particular relation-
ship. Gratitude is a philosophical emotion. It is, in a phrase, seeing the bigger
picture. In relationships, it is seeing a particular act or transaction as part of a
larger and ongoing relationship. The limiting case, in which one is briefly
grateful to a stranger whom one will (probably) never see again, underscores
the nature of the more usual case in which one probably will see the other
person again.The bigger picture in such a case is not the one-off nature of the
episode but the frequency of such episodes and one’s need to be grateful to
any number of strangers, of which this is just one instance. Thus Blanche
Dubois’s classic statement that she had always depended on “the kindness of
strangers” (Tennessee Williams, 1947) expressed an astute philosophy, not
just a personal observation. So viewed, opening one’s heart to the universe is
not so much personifying the universe as opening one’s heart, that is, ex-
panding one’s perspective.
And so viewed, being grateful for one’s whole life is not a “grateful to
whom?” question so much as it is a matter of being aware of one’s whole life,
being reflective in a way that most of us are not, most of the time.And when
one is reflective and aware of one’s whole life, one recognizes how much of