Date created: | Last Updated:

Category: Project

Description: Feelings and expressions of gratitude play a central role in exchanges that are fundamental to human cooperation. In controlled experiments, indirectly inducing gratitude by providing people with resources from others has been shown to motivate pro-social behavior. Can directly organizing people to say thanks to others have similar effects and make people feel more positive about their contributions to the common good? Or do people select into supportive behaviors including gratitude? In a field experiment with experienced contributors to three language communities of the online encyclopedia Wikipedia, we tested the effect on senders of expressing gratitude to others .