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from the thank-you-so-very-much-for-reading-this! dept.
Why Don't People Express Gratitude More Often?
“Researchers have known for 15 years that gratitude improves well-being. There’s lots of work done on this already,” says Amit Kumar, assistant professor of marketing at the McCombs School of Business and lead author of a new paper that examines the consequences of showing appreciation. “What was interesting to me is that even though it’s something that’s well-known, people still don’t express gratitude all that often.”
To find out why, Kumar and his co-author Nicholas Epley, from the University of Chicago, conducted a series of studies recently published in Psychological Science looking at what happens when people send letters of gratitude.
Their findings offer insight into why people tend to withhold their gratitude, shattering some myths, and validating a simple message: Your appreciation means far more to people than you think.
The study had letter-writers estimate how much the recipient would be surprised by the thank-you note and how much they would appreciate it. Further, they asked how important it was that it used "just the right" words and how articulate they appeared. The letter-writers significantly underestimated how much their letters were appreciated, and how little importance the recipient placed on the wording compared to the sincerity of the message that was sent:
“What we saw is that it only takes a couple minutes to compose letters like these — thoughtful and sincere ones,” says Kumar. “It comes at little cost, but the benefits are larger than people expect.”
So pick up your pen, keyboard, or phone and write that thank-you note.
So, if you've been holding off on sending someone a thank-you note, do not despair. A short, genuine expression of thanks means a lot and can help you feel better, too!
(Score: 5, Interesting) by ledow on Wednesday August 29 2018, @08:59AM (5 children)
Okay, consider me an "outsider" to social norms... I'm pretty certain I have serious autistic traits but I've honestly never bothered to get diagnosed for it as I can lead a life I enjoy.
Gratitude is common.
Expression of it is rare.
However, the reason is one of the problems - gratitude for *expected* things (like people doing their job, following courtesy basics, etc.) feels insincere. You don't need to express how grateful you are for me holding the door. I should damn well be doing that anyway. Gratitude becomes a tribal bonding ritual, which people use to their advantage but being "grateful" to you in order to gain favour with you.
It doesn't mean we should say please and thank you, we absolutely should. But they've become routine. What we don't do is break routine unless something specifically extraordinary has happened. Then and only then do we express gratitude.
But written gratitude - that's almost bearing on the creepy nowadays, isn't it? Sure, you can text or send a Facebook update ("Thanks for organising the party!") etc. but a letter is just out of place in the modern world. Strangely, I think it's generational. As I work in a private school I often deal with some very polite people and a lot of older former pupils who want photos of their class from the 60's and things like that. They tend to be extraordinarily polite, and a letter of gratitude from them is... not unexpected, and nice. But a letter of gratitude from the younger parents or pupils seems a bit out of place.
I think this has much more to do with letter-writing (a legacy action, no matter what you think) than expression of gratitude. I receive a dozen of so really genuine emails of gratitude each year and they are just as appreciated. I also receive a bucket of "faux gratitude" (i.e. people seeking favour, people jumping on other's bandwagons to try not to appear insincere, etc.). But letters are just a different medium.
Whether you're complaining or praising, a letter is treated differently because of the effort it took. Anyone can blast out an email but writing a letter is different.
Please note - to myself, faux gratitude can be worse than no gratitude at all. There's a reason the English find the American phraseology quite strange... people *don't* tell us to have a nice day unless they mean it, or they're just the kind of person that says that. In America it can feel very forced, and that to me is worse than saying nothing at all.
And anything that's... unnecessary, or over the top, or unusual can feel forced in the same manner.
I have friends that write thank-you notes for EVERYTHING. You get used to them, and realise it's just their way, and it ironically ends up meaning *less*, because they always do it. I mean... what do they do when they are REALLY grateful not just ordinary-grateful?
It's nice to express gratitude. But in the same way that if you just yell at your kids 100% of the time, soon you realise you have no power as your kids are just acclimatised to that, if you write thank-you notes all the time the same happens. Recognise the above-and-beyond when it happens, not every single action.
It's also present in the tipping cultures between the UK and US. In the UK, you generally tip only when you've had *good* service. The tip is a recognition, a gratuity. I have friends who were chased down the street because they DIDN'T leave a tip in the US (and, yes, it was "optional"). That's just unbelievably rude to an Englishman, and you'd have EVERY optional tip stripped of you at that point. Because if you expect a tip every single time, then it's not a tip. It's not a recognition. It's just a fee.
Express gratitude where it's due. Everyday gratitude for everyday actions. Extraordinary gratitude for extraordinary actions. Otherwise you're more likely to come across as fake/false than anything else.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 29 2018, @09:29AM
One thing that I needed to 'slack' to a colleague (recent hire) goes like this
I stopped short in using 'patronising' as the last word.
This was in reply to his: "good work on chasing this stuff".
(Score: 2) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Wednesday August 29 2018, @09:41AM (1 child)
My friend Dave Johnson [seeingtheforest.com] flew from San Francisco to Geneva so he could visit me shortly before the end of my UCSC Senior Thesis work at CERN in the Summer of 1993.
Dave, a couple of CERN friends and I went to dinner in a French restaurant. While for the whole Summer I always felt uncomfortable to not leave a tip, I at least understood that I should not do so.
We had good service for a modestly expensive meal, then we left without tipping.
Dave was appalled.
He kept protesting, eventually to grow fearful that our waiter would come after us with one of those big restaurant kitchen knives.
FWIW my thesis was a monte carlo calculation of the Acceptance - loosely speaking the Efficiency - of the Spin Muon Collaboration's to Non-Conservation of Lepton Number. I started Grad School in Santa Cruz in the Fall immediately after that Summer.
My advisor Clem Heusch and I expected that I would return to CERN a year later after I - somehow - passed the Physics Qualifier Exam and so obtained my Master's Degree. Clem and I as well as the postdoc he hoped to hire would analyze a Jesus Big pile of 8 mm videotapes.
Were we to actually discover what we were looking for, Clem would have won the Nobel and my name would have been on the paper. I would long have go achieved tenure at a respectable school.
Too bad the US National Reconnaissance Office snapped a photo of the North Korean's Nuclear Reactor which at the time the DPRK lucidly explained as "Intended for the purely peaceful generation of electricity.
That every Physics student is heavily into understanding The Bomb lead Hilarity To Ensue.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 29 2018, @10:59AM
Good grief. It's like if "The Big Bang Theory" had been a web forum instead of a TV series.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by KritonK on Wednesday August 29 2018, @11:33AM
Gratitude for expected things is not insincere: thank your for being here to do what to you may simply be your job, but I would not have been able to do on my own. (Whether it's as simple as accepting my money at the supermarket or as complicated as fixing the plumbing in my house.)
I can tell that a simple "thank you" is always appreciated, especially as many people don't bother, not to mention some people's attitude of "this is your job, so I expect you to cater to my every whim, and I've got lots of them".
As to faux politeness, as long as it isn't blatantly slimy, it has its place. I'd much rather have someone tell me "good morning sir, how may I help you" than "what do you want".
(Score: 3, Insightful) by acid andy on Wednesday August 29 2018, @02:20PM
To me, the distinction between e-mail and snail mail letters really lies almost entirely in the medium. The words can be the same. I'll grant you that having a piece of paper you can hold and keep, adorned with someone's own handwriting, adds a certain sort of sentimentality, and there's the legal advantage that a written letter is that much harder to forge either by an imposter or at a later date.
You're covering two separate issues I think. The expression of deep gratitude is important when the time is right for it. Saying please and thank you, I would classify as part of having good manners. I consider those very important too, for slightly different reasons. I think it shows a certain degree of respect for another person. If someone says please or thank you, it might be an indication that they aren't about to hit you on the head with a rock, polite psychopaths aside. It shows that the person is willing to engage in a civil, polite level of communication with you. That in itself is valuable.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?