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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: 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.