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Reciprocity Behavior in the Relationship Between Donor and Recipient and Between Harm-Doer and Victim

DOI:10.2307/3033537
Authors:
Daniel Bar-Tal at Tel Aviv University
Daniel Bar-Tal
Yaakov bar-zohar at Beit Berl College
Yaakov bar-zohar
Hermon
Hermon
Hermon
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Martin S. Greenberg
Martin S. Greenberg
Martin S. Greenberg
  • This person is not on ResearchGate, or hasn't claimed this research yet.
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Abstract

Perceptions of help-rendering and harm-doing were tested by presenting 50 male and 50 female university students with one of a series of hypothetical situations. Preexisting relationship between interactors in the situation referred to five social relationships linking the subject with a parent, sibling, close friend, and acquaintance, or a stranger. Results indicated that the closer the relationship between the interacting persons, the stronger the expectations that help should be offered; the less gratitude expressed when help is offered; and the more resentment felt when help is refused.
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... Gratitude is well established as an emotion linked to the development of cooperative relationships (Algoe & Haidt, 2009;Bar-Tal et al., 1977;Bartlett et al., 2012;DeSteno et al., 2010;Emmons & McCullough, 2003;Lim, 2012;Nowak & Roch, 2006;Tesser et al., 1968). But what inputs and decision rules compose the mental software that generates the affective state that we label gratitude? ...
... Though social-value-based models of gratitude have received some empirical attention (e.g., Bar-Tal et al., 1977;Forster et al., 2017;Lim, 2012;Smith et al., 2017), previous efforts have been limited in various ways. Three reports, though comprehensive in their use of scenarios that teased apart various causal components, were limited because of their reliance on responses to hypothetical scenarios in which no benefits were actually exchanged at the time of measurement (Bar-Tal et al., 1977;Forster et al., 2017;Lim, 2012). ...
... Though social-value-based models of gratitude have received some empirical attention (e.g., Bar-Tal et al., 1977;Forster et al., 2017;Lim, 2012;Smith et al., 2017), previous efforts have been limited in various ways. Three reports, though comprehensive in their use of scenarios that teased apart various causal components, were limited because of their reliance on responses to hypothetical scenarios in which no benefits were actually exchanged at the time of measurement (Bar-Tal et al., 1977;Forster et al., 2017;Lim, 2012). In one experiment in which subjects believed that their earnings were affected by others' decisions within the study, Smith et al. (2017) found a strong link between how much recipients' WTRs toward benefactors increased and their reported feelings of gratitude, but they did not measure recipients' perceptions of benefactors' WTRs toward themselves, nor did they vary the magnitude of costs and benefits. ...
Evaluating Benefits, Costs, and Social Value as Predictors of Gratitude
Article
Although much is known about cooperation, the internal decision rules that regulate motivations to initiate and maintain cooperative relationships have not been thoroughly explored. Here, we focus on how acts of benefit delivery and perceptions of social value inform gratitude, an emotion that promotes cooperation. We evaluated alternate information-processing models to determine which inputs and internal representations best account for the intensity with which people report experiencing gratitude. Across two experiments (Ns = 257 and 208), we tested 10 models that consider multiple variables: the magnitude of benefits conferred on beneficiaries, the magnitude of costs incurred by benefactors, beneficiaries' perception of how much benefactors value their welfare, and beneficiaries' value for the welfare of their benefactors. Across both studies, only beneficiaries' change in social valuation for their benefactors consistently predicted gratitude. Results point to the need for further research and contribute to the growing literature linking cooperation, social emotions, and social valuation.
... Gratitude is well-established as an emotion linked to the development of cooperative relationships (Algoe & Haidt, 2009;Bar-Tal, Bar-Zohar, Greenberg, & Hermon, 1977;Bartlett, Condon, Cruz, Baumann, & Desteno, 2012;DeSteno, Bartlett, Baumann, Williams, & Dickens, 2010;Emmons & McCullough, 2003;Lim, 2012;Nowak & Roch, 2006;Tesser, Gatewood, & Driver, 1968). But what inputs and decision rules comprise the mental software that generates the affective state that we label as gratitude? ...
... Though social value-based models of gratitude have received some empirical attention (e.g., Bar-Tal et al., 1977;Forster et al., 2017;Lim, 2012;Smith et al., 2017), previous efforts have been limited in various ways. Three reports, though comprehensive in their use of scenarios that teased apart various causal components, were limited due to their reliance on responses to hypothetical scenarios in which no benefits were actually exchanged at the time of measurement (Bar-Tal et al., 1977;Forster et al., 2017;Lim, 2012). ...
... Though social value-based models of gratitude have received some empirical attention (e.g., Bar-Tal et al., 1977;Forster et al., 2017;Lim, 2012;Smith et al., 2017), previous efforts have been limited in various ways. Three reports, though comprehensive in their use of scenarios that teased apart various causal components, were limited due to their reliance on responses to hypothetical scenarios in which no benefits were actually exchanged at the time of measurement (Bar-Tal et al., 1977;Forster et al., 2017;Lim, 2012). In one experiment in which subjects believed their earnings were affected by others' decisions within the study, Smith et al. (2017) found a strong link between how much recipients increased their WTRs toward benefactors and their reported feelings of gratitude, but they did not measure recipients' perceptions of benefactors' WTRs toward themselves, nor did they vary the magnitude of costs and benefits. ...
Evaluating benefits, costs, and social value as predictors of gratitude
Preprint
Full-text available
  • Sep 2021
Although much is known about cooperation, the internal decision rules that regulate motivations to initiate and maintain cooperative relationships have not been thoroughly explored. Here, we focus on how acts of benefit delivery and perceptions of social value inform gratitude, an emotion that promotes cooperation. We evaluate alternate information-processing models to determine which inputs and internal representations best account for the intensity with which people report experiencing gratitude. Across two experiments (Ns = 257; 208), we test ten models that consider multiple variables: the magnitude of benefits conferred upon beneficiaries, the magnitude of costs incurred by benefactors, beneficiaries’ perception of how much benefactors value their welfare, and beneficiaries’ value for the welfare of their benefactors. Across both studies, only beneficiaries’ change in social valuation for their benefactors consistently predicted gratitude. Results point to future research and contribute to the growing literature linking cooperation, social emotions, and social valuation.
... Psychologists have identified four factors that inspire gratitude [12][13][14][15]: the value of benefits, the cost of helpers, the helper's intention, and the obligation to assist. In contrast, Kuranaga and Higuchi found that the "naturalness of the situation" suppresses the gratitude of the Japanese people in their psychological studies [16]. ...
... This study is the first to provide a new research method using digital devices for gratitude study. Until now, questionnaires have been the primary measurement method in studies of gratitude characteristics [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20][21][22]. Intervention methods, such as writing on paper, such as a thank you letter or expressing thanks verbally, have been used in studies of gratitude intervention [23][24][25][26][27][28][29][30][31]. ...
Digitalizing Gratitude and Building Trust through Technology in a Post-COVID-19 World—Report of a Case from Japan
Article
Full-text available
  • Jan 2022
Employee engagement has become a critical issue in Japanese companies. One way to develop it is to improve the relationship among employees through gratitude expressions. In the post-COVID-19 remote work environment, digital devices are essential. This paper confirms that expressions of gratitude delivered via digital devices enhance the relationship between employees. We experimented in a small-town government office where participants (n = 88) were asked to (1) use the Thanks App, an app we developed to express gratitude, for two months and (2) respond to an engagement survey we developed before and after the experimental period. Through cross-analysis of the data from the app and questionnaire, we found that the “trust in colleagues” factor had a strong correlation (r = 0.80, p < 0.001) with our new index computed by the app’s data. The results suggest that the use of the Thanks App may help visualize the trust relationship among teams. This study has a practical value in providing a new team management tool for visualizing team trust. In addition, it provides a new research method for emotional and social psychology using digital devices.
... Therefore, if the beneficiary of help expects to have opportunities to reciprocate in the future, then he/she has less need for immediate reciprocity. For example, when they receive help from friends or members of a closely related group, their desire for immediate reciprocity is lesser Bar-Tal et al., 1977). It is reasonable to expect that, when the perceived connectedness with others increases, people from an interdependent society expect many opportunities for reciprocation. ...
Gratitude Intervention Evokes Indebtedness: Moderated by Perceived Social Distance
Article
Full-text available
  • Mar 2022
Previous study suggests that gratitude intervention evokes indebtedness among people from an interdependent society. This study furtherly hypothesized that perceived social distance moderates the effect of gratitude intervention on felt indebtedness. A total of 275 adolescents were randomly assigned to three gratitude intervention conditions, namely, writing gratitude to significant others, the health of one’s own, or nothing. After completing the writing task, they rated their experienced emotions on ten dimensions, including gratitude and indebtedness. They also reported perceived social distance from surrounding people and other demographical information. Results indicated that participants in the condition of writing about gratitude to significant others felt indebted regardless of perceived social distance, while those in the condition of writing about gratitude to his/her own health and those in the control condition experienced lesser indebtedness as the perceived social distance with others becomes closer. Gratitude increases as perceived social connectedness increases across all conditions. Theoretical and practical implications were discussed.
... In both experiments, participants were instructed to ask five friends for a small favor via their assigned communication channel after predicting how many of their friends would comply. We chose to have participants solicit help from friends rather than strangers because this most closely resembles the way help requests play out in the ''real world'' and organizational settings, as people are much more likely to seek help from people with whom they have an established relationship (Bar-Tal et al., 1977;Deri et al., 2019). ...
Should I Ask Over Zoom, Phone, Email, or In-Person? Communication Channel and Predicted Versus Actual Compliance
Article
Full-text available
  • Dec 2021
Research has found that people are much more likely to agree to help requests made in-person than those made via text-based media, but that help-seekers underestimate the relative advantage of asking for help face-to-face. It remains unknown what help-seekers’ intuitions about the effectiveness of richer media channels incorporating audio and video features might be, or how these intuitions would compare with the actual effectiveness of face-to-face or email versus rich media requests. In two behavioral and two supplemental vignette experiments, participants expected differences in the effectiveness of seeking help through various communication channels to be quite small, or nonexistent. However, when participants actually made requests, the differences were substantial. Ultimately, help-seekers underestimated the relative advantage of asking for help face-to-face compared with asking through any mediated channel. Help-seekers also underestimated the relative advantage of asking through richer media channels compared with email.
... In both experiments, participants were instructed to ask five friends for a small favor via their assigned communication channel after predicting how many of their friends would comply. We Help-seeking Across Communication Channels 7 chose to have participants solicit help from friends rather than strangers because this most closely resembles the way help requests play out in the "real world" and organizational settings, as people are much more likely to seek help from people with whom they have an established relationship (Bar-Tal et al., 1977;Deri et al., 2019). ...
Should I Ask Over Zoom, Phone, or In-Person? Communication Channel and Predicted vs. Actual Compliance
Preprint
Full-text available
  • Nov 2021
Research has found that people are much more likely to agree to help requests made in-person than those made via text-based media, but that help-seekers underestimate the relative advantage of asking for help face-to-face. It remains unknown what help-seekers’ intuitions about the effectiveness of richer media channels incorporating audio and video features might be, or how these intuitions would compare to the actual effectiveness of face-to-face or email versus rich media requests. In two behavioral and two supplemental vignette experiments, participants expected differences in the effectiveness of seeking help through various communication channels to be quite small, or nonexistent. However, when participants actually made requests, the differences were quite large. Ultimately, help-seekers underestimated the relative advantage of asking for help face-to-face compared to asking through any mediated channel. Help-seekers also underestimated the relative advantage of asking through richer media channels compared to email.
... Bolton and Mattila (2015) also found that people use relationship norms as standards to evaluate appropriate behaviourin our study whether to terminate a sponsorship or switch support to another cause. Those who have communal norms also felt grateful toward those organizations or people who helped and resentful towards those who refused to help (Bar-Tal et al. 1977). Finally, individuals in communal (vs exchange) relationships expect partners to be more responsive to their needs and provide more help (Bolton and Mattila 2015). ...
When partners divorce: understanding consumers’ reactions to partnership termination in cause-related marketing programs
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  • Mar 2021
... Not only do people hold high expectations from their friends, they also actively try to live up to these expectations in order to maintain their close relationships [37]. Correspondingly, when friends engage in a behavior that violates the expectations of them, they are judged negatively compared to strangers performing the same behavior [34,[38][39][40][41][42]. For example, participants playing a competitive card game in which the deck of cards was fixed remembered that their friends made more competitive moves than strangers did, although the number of possible competitive moves was identical [43]. ...
Motivated Interpretations of Deceptive Information
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We examine whether people seek information that might help them make sense of others’ dishonest behavior. Participants were told that a hypothetical partner (either a friend or a stranger) had engaged in a task in which the partner could lie to boost their earnings at the expense of the participant’s earnings. Participants were less likely to search for information that can justify potential dishonest behavior conducted by a friend than by a stranger (Experiment 1). When participants knew for certain that their partners had lied to them, they were less likely to assume that that the lie was justified when told that the partner was a friend rather than a stranger (Experiment 2). The results imply that people are more likely to search for information that may reduce the severity of possible dishonest behavior when a stranger, rather than a friend, is responsible for the behavior.
Comparing gratitude and pride: evidence from brain and behavior
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Gratitude and pride are both positive emotions. Yet gratitude motivates people to help others and build up relationships, whereas pride motivates people to pursue achievements and build on self-esteem. Although these social outcomes are crucial for humans to be evolutionarily adaptive, no study so far has systematically compared gratitude and pride to understand why and how they can motivate humans differently. In this review, we compared gratitude and pride from their etymologies, cognitive prerequisites, motivational functions, and brain regions involved. By integrating the evidence from brain and behavior, we suggest that gratitude and pride share a common reward basis, yet gratitude is more related to theory of mind, while pride is more related to self-referential processing. Moreover, we proposed a cognitive neuroscientific model to explain the dynamics in gratitude and pride under a reinforcement learning framework.
Appreciating Social Science Research on Gratitude: An Integrative Review for Organizational Scholarship on Gratitude in the Workplace
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Though gratitude research in organizational behavior (OB) is nascent, this emotion has a rich history in the social sciences. Research has shown gratitude to promote prosocial behaviors, encourage personal well-being, and foster interpersonal relationships. However, gratitude research has been siloed among these three outcomes of gratitude (moral, wellness, and relational). Similarly, past reviews of gratitude have focused on only one group of outcomes, one of its forms (trait, state, or expressed), or empirical findings without emphasis on the theoretical underpinnings. In contrast, this review recognizes that each type of gratitude, its functions, and outcomes are part of a single process model of gratitude. As such, in the current review we provide a comprehensive assessment of gratitude in the social sciences by distilling and organizing the literature per our process model of episodic gratitude. Then, we translate the insights for management scholars, highlighting possible differences and synergies between extant research and workplace gratitude thereby helping advance “gratitude science” in the workplace. In all, this review (a) examines definitions and operationalizations of gratitude and provides recommendations for organizational research; (b) proposes a process model of episodic workplace gratitude as a conceptual map to guide future OB research on gratitude; (c) reviews empirical gratitude research through the lens of our process model; and (d) discusses the current state of the literature, important differences for workplace gratitude, and future directions for organizational scholars.
Affecting the Salience of the Social Responsibility Norm: Effects of Past Help on the Response to Dependency Relationships
Article
  • Apr 1964
A series of experiments by the authors assumes that many people in our society are motivated to aid others who are dependent upon them because such help is prescribed by a "social responsibility norm." The present study also assumes that prior help can increase the salience of this norm. In a 2 X 2 X 2 factorial design using 80 Ss (college women), ½ of the Ss were individually helped by a peer (E's confederate) on a preliminary task, while the others were not aided. After this, the Ss worked on another task under the supposed supervision of yet another peer, with ½ of the Ss being told the supervisor was highly dependent upon their work and the others told she was less dependent upon them. The 1st peer would supposedly learn of their work in ½ of the cases but not in the other ½. The previously helped Ss tended to exert the greatest effort in behalf of their dependent peer. A self-report scale assessing social responsibility tendencies was significantly correlated with the effort measure in the Prior Help-High Dependency condition.