"I do not cease to give thanks for you, remembering you in my prayers." (Ephesians 1:16)
Overview
Conventional wisdom tells us that a simple thank you can make someone’s day. According to research, expressions of gratitude can enhance motivation, relationships, and even our own optimism and life outlook (Grant & Gino, 2010; Lambert & Fincham, 2011).
However, simply saying “thank you” has become so common that it may have lost its luster to those who hear it. If that is the case, making someone’s day through expressing our gratitude may require more than a few short words, and we may be deceiving ourselves into thinking we’ve truly helped someone with those few short words when, in fact, we have not.
However, simply saying “thank you” has become so common that it may have lost its luster to those who hear it. If that is the case, making someone’s day through expressing our gratitude may require more than a few short words, and we may be deceiving ourselves into thinking we’ve truly helped someone with those few short words when, in fact, we have not.
The Experiment
To test whether a simple thank you can truly boost someone’s mood, we designed a survey experiment and recruited 403 people from Amazon MTurk. The experiment consisted of half of our participants receiving a nice thank you message or standard boilerplate (randomly assigned) at the end of one of our 5-minute surveys. After seeing either the thank you or boilerplate, participants rated their current level of happiness via the survey question, "How happy are you right now, at this moment?" with answer options along a 7-point scale (1 = Not at all, 7 = Very much).
Below are the thank you and boilerplate texts that were shown to our participant sample.
Below are the thank you and boilerplate texts that were shown to our participant sample.
Boilerplate Condition:
“This is the last survey question.”
“This is the last survey question.”
Thank You Condition:
“Thank you so much for taking this survey!”
“We really appreciate the time and effort you put into answering these questions. This is the last survey question.”
“Thank you so much for taking this survey!”
“We really appreciate the time and effort you put into answering these questions. This is the last survey question.”
Results
Unfortunately, there was only a trivial increase in happiness (p = 0.394) when participants read the thank you message (avg. = 5.46) relative to the boilerplate message (avg. = 5.34). As the graph below illustrates, this difference was well within our tight margin of error, making it very unlikely that a simple thank you at the end of a survey makes participants even slightly happier.
Conclusion
If you’re searching for ways to do good for others, you may not want to stop at saying thank you. The results of this experiment suggest that a simple thank you alone may not be enough to make much of a difference to the recipient.
Of course, this should not dissuade us from expressing our gratitude to others. In fact, most research suggests that it does make a difference. It likely depends on the context and the specific way of expressing gratitude. For example, a nice thank you gift, praising others publicly, or being more specific about what you’re grateful for and the difference it’s made to you and others would likely show much larger effects than our simple end-of-survey thank you message. And if that’s not enough of a reason, remember that gratitude is still an important virtue for our Christian walk. Plus research suggests it may even help you feel better.
With that in mind, we sincerely thank you for your interest in our work, and we look forward to continuing to provide you with rigorous Christian research.
Of course, this should not dissuade us from expressing our gratitude to others. In fact, most research suggests that it does make a difference. It likely depends on the context and the specific way of expressing gratitude. For example, a nice thank you gift, praising others publicly, or being more specific about what you’re grateful for and the difference it’s made to you and others would likely show much larger effects than our simple end-of-survey thank you message. And if that’s not enough of a reason, remember that gratitude is still an important virtue for our Christian walk. Plus research suggests it may even help you feel better.
With that in mind, we sincerely thank you for your interest in our work, and we look forward to continuing to provide you with rigorous Christian research.
References
Grant, A. M., & Gino, F. (2010). A little thanks goes a long way: Explaining why gratitude expressions motivate prosocial behavior. Journal of personality and social psychology, 98(6), 946.
Lambert, N. M., & Fincham, F. D. (2011). Expressing gratitude to a partner leads to more relationship maintenance behavior. Emotion, 11(1), 52.
Lambert, N. M., & Fincham, F. D. (2011). Expressing gratitude to a partner leads to more relationship maintenance behavior. Emotion, 11(1), 52.