Thankful: The Science of Gratitude

Tis the season of thankfulness, so in this episode of Stuff to Blow Your Mind, Robert and Joe explore the science of Gratitude.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow Your Mind, a production of
I Heart Radios How Stuff Works. Hey you, welcome to
Stuff to Blow your Mind. My name is Robert Lamb,
and I'm Joe McCormick, and hey, Robert jam band trivia
for you. Do you know where the name of the
Grateful Dead comes from? Oh? Man, you know, I'm not

(00:25):
a huge dead head. I really love that that track
Dark Star, But yeah, I I never really gave it
a lot of thought. I know they have the like
a sort of a mascot of like this medieval looking
skeleton with the hair and and all, and it's it's
a cool name, but I actually never gave it a
lot of thought. I didn't know until just recently I
found out the answer. The name of the band comes

(00:46):
from when a member I think it was Jerry Garcia,
it might have been another member. Somebody found in an
encyclopedia an entry for a thing that was that was
already an existing phrase called the Grateful Dead. So what
is that? Well, it turns out that the Grateful Dead
is an archetypal folk tale motif that appears in lots

(01:07):
of cultures around the world, usually not as a story
on its own, but as like a piece of a story,
a sort of like scene in a story that shows
up in tons of different folk tale cycles. According to
the late Great American folklore scholar Stith Thompson, versions of
this tailor found especially in European and Asian lore, though
I think you might find it elsewhere too. But to

(01:29):
read from Thompson's description quote, in all these tales, we
learn of a hero who finds that creditors are refusing
to permit the burial of a corpse until the dead
man's debts have been paid. The hero spends his last
penny to ransom the dead man's body and to secure
his burial. Later, in the course of his adventures, the

(01:51):
hero is joined by a mysterious stranger who agrees to
help him in all his endeavors. The stranger is the
grateful dead Man. The only condition which the dead man
makes when he agrees to help the hero is that
all winnings which the latter makes shall be equally divided.
In all the stories, the hero eventually wins a wife,

(02:12):
and the helper demands his half. Usually, the dead man
interferes in time to prevent the actual cutting. In two
of the woman, so multiple strange elements there. Number one,
of course, it reminds me of the like King Solomon
and the Baby story, but it also reminds me of
other I mean, I think it's extremely common to have
what would you call this dynamic folk tale motifs where

(02:34):
someone is asked to make a promise about what they
will do with some kind of future reward or something,
but then the reward they receive is not compatible with
the promise they made. I think of the examples in
like Sir Gawain and the Green Night, where uh the
Sir Gawain in some versions of the story, I think
Sir Gawain stays with the host, who they say each

(02:56):
day they will they will share what they have one
in the day with the other one. So the one guy,
the host, goes out hunting and he comes back and
he shares like the boar that he caught with Sir Gawain.
But Sir Gawain instead receives a kiss from the man's wife,
and so to share it he has to kiss the man.
But of course, the final element here is that it's

(03:17):
ultimately a story about a kindness being repaid. It's a
story about gratitude from a ghost that somebody does a
kindness that he could not possibly expect to be repaid,
and yet in some strange and supernatural fashion, he ends
up surprised because his kindness is repaid against everything you
would expect. And in this we get into the topic

(03:38):
of gratitude of of thankfulness, which of course seems an
obvious thing to tackle on Thanksgiving. Uh, And that's one
of the reasons we chose it. But also it is
it is an important topic. It is an important part
of the human experience and human culture, and so there's
actually a lot here to unpack. Absolutely. I mean, I
would say this is not the only folk tale motif

(03:59):
to heavily involved gratitude. Gratitude shows up all throughout full stories. Uh.
Like the ungrateful receiver is a big archetype, somebody who
is ungrateful for what has been done for them, and they,
you know, are punished or learn a lesson. And the
other side is, yes, somehow seeing gratefulness turning out for

(04:20):
the best, You do somebody a favor and then you
are repaid and their gratitude, Uh, is it unveils like
secret benefits that you couldn't have expected. Yes, Sometimes the
stranger that you are favorable to turns out to be
a divine being of some sort. Uh. There are also
tons of tales in which if if one is punished
or rewarded for either uh you know, not respecting elders

(04:44):
or respecting elders, being rewarded for the respect. So yeah,
this is the gratitude is an important part of of
global myth making and then just continuing early a part
of our storytelling. So let's come back to American Thanksgiving though,
because um, all of this isn't necessarily obvious as we

(05:04):
go through, uh just our day to day experience of
Thanksgiving here in America, because it can often feel like
a very complicated holiday. For instance, let me just roll
through a few of the several reasons to hate on Thanksgiving,
and I'm I am guilty of some of these, if
not all. You've clearly got to love hate relationship because
you you keep wanting to talk about Thanksgiving even though

(05:26):
you hate it. Yeah, well, I mean I have I
feel like if I am resistant to something like Thanksgiving,
then I should probably explore how I feel about it more,
you know, and also perhaps feel explore the things that
I feel good about. So, on one hand, thanksgiving us
what you get when Halloween is over? Bummer, Yeah, it's
it's all that transition away from ghosts and ghouls and

(05:48):
Dracula's and Frankenstein's and uh, you know, and the other
properly named literary figures that we refer to in the
general sense, and then suddenly it's just pilgrims and turkeys
and whatnot. Not everybody to your monster freaks like us.
Though true, true, some may see it as a relief. Now.
Another thing is that, as is often pointed out in comedy,

(06:08):
it is a you know, it's a post election obligation
to hang out with family members who you may very
well not see eye to eye on when it comes
to politics. Can make things a little awkward, uh you know,
and if you're lucky, it can make things awkward. Of course,
can be worse than that. Also, it is a feast,
and while feasts are a major part of seasonal celebrations
around the world, it can feel a bit excessive in

(06:31):
the modern age. It can bring up mixed feelings about, say,
the amount of food that you are consuming and perhaps
the amount of food waste you might be producing. Also,
if you've lost loved ones of individuals are missing from
the proceedings for various reasons, you know, living or dead,
or if you yourself cannot be part of such celebrations
with family for a variety of reasons. The holiday can

(06:54):
be bitter, sweet, or downright depressing. Uh And and in
this it's like other holidays. This is absolutly true. And
I think this this contributed to the widely circulated but
false fact that suicide skyrocket around uh, Thanksgiving and Christmas.
We looked into that on an episode one time and
found that it was not in fact true, that they

(07:14):
were not highest around the winter months. I think they
were actually highest somewhere in the spring. Yeah, yeah, I
remember that. Another thing about Thanksgiving in America is that
the Pilgrim and Native American aspects of the holidays, trappings
and sometimes decorations which many of us grew up with,
they can feel rather off putting. The more you realize
about the exploitation of First Nations people and or the

(07:36):
religious views of the Pilgrims one of those the more
you know, the more uh you know at least awkward
it can feel. And then, of course the Thanksgiving parade
is not quite as fun as it seemed when you
were seven, it never seemed fun. You never got into
that at all. No, I like big balloons, but the
parade aspect seemed it seemed over long and tedious. Yeah yeah, yeah,

(07:59):
I guess so. But I was down for just watching
any television at that age. So okay, Now, I didn't
mean to rain on your your parade, literally no, no.
Because now I don't watch it nowadays, I'm really not
even tempted to. But when I was a child, at
one point, it was big fun. On the positive side, though,
depending on your own personal experience in situation, perhaps you
can attest to finding some or all of the following

(08:21):
aspects of American Thanksgiving fulfilling. First of all, American football.
It's not my thing, but I know a lot of
people love it, and Thanksgiving is a time to watch
it obsessively. Somebody's thing, now something it is my thing.
The Mystery Science Theater, three thousand Turkey Day Marathon. Hey
now we're cooking? Yeah, that that was and still is
one of my favorites. It doesn't feel like Thanksgiving unless

(08:43):
I'm watching some sort of a rift movie. Generally it's
Jack Frost. That's a really good one. That's the one
with the like the Russian fairy tale and I guess yeah,
and they're they're actually some perhaps some examples of gratitude
playing into the the traditional folk tale alls that are
brought to cinematic life in that film. Oh yeah, early
on then the story isn't Jack or not Jack? The

(09:05):
boy in the story, he's he's quite ungrateful. I'm titled right, yeah,
And then he's taught a lesson by father mushroom. Let's
see other other things. Perhaps they're positive aspects of family gatherings.
A family gathering is a family gathering, um, and it
can be quite joyful. There's nostalgia wound up in the
practice as well. Of course, also, perhaps you really do

(09:27):
enjoy the food. I mean, people are gonna vary on
Thanksgiving food, but get a little jab in there for
people who hate food. Well, no, I don't hate food,
but Thanksgiving dishes are usually not my absolute favorite dishes. Oh,
I see the style of Thanksgiving food as traditionally prepared. Yet,
but some people that might be your thing, and if so,

(09:49):
you know, go for it. You know, I am firmly
of the opinion that people should not feel compelled to
eat certain foods because it is a certain holiday. If
it's the fourth of July and you're hanging out by
the water, but you don't want to eat burgers and
hot dogs and barbecue, don't eat burgers. How do you
eat whatever you want to eat on Thanksgiving? I am
I strongly believe people should have kim che centric feasts

(10:12):
and and really that's that gets to my next point
is that you may look forward to Thanksgiving because you've
created your own ritual. You have created something new, something fresh,
that you share with family and or friends, that that
means something more to you than some of these more
you know, traditional tropes of the season. But I think
that the vast majority of us, wherever you fall in

(10:34):
on these various points, you can probably agree on one thing. Surely,
thankfulness itself. Gratitude itself is a useful exercise. Well, I mean,
I think a lot of people might agree on that
in principle, but then not really agree on it in practice. Well. Yes,
so it's one thing to think it one thing to
another to act on it. Uh, you know, the the

(10:56):
act or even thought of being thankful though for what
you have in life, no matter how small, no matter
how cruel fate may seem at times, there is I
think generally an idea that this is good, this is beneficial,
and if somebody is arguing something contrary to that, they're
probably doing it to get a rise out of you.
With you know, some exceptions, I'm sure. So we're actually

(11:18):
going to be talking about gratitude and thankfulness today, right.
I was thinking about how okay this subject might at
first glance, seemed kind of quaint compared to like the
grotesque evolutionary realities and strange frontiers of understanding that we
often like to explore on the show. But I think
this kind of research, by which I mean investigation of

(11:40):
like fundamental positive emotional states, is extremely important. It's actually
highly relevant as a scientific frontier because whatever you may
think you know, or whatever you think is obvious about
how to live a good life, just look at the
ways we actually live and in practice humans are clearly
not in agreement about how to live a good life,

(12:01):
and like, what are the correct emotional states to seek
and how to seek them? In practice, we don't always
have reliable ways of orienting our mental and emotional lives
to the maximum benefit of ourselves and others. So I
think this kind of thing, the study of positive emotions
and positive social interactions, is actually a crucial socially relevant

(12:21):
psychological frontier and a workshop for the tools for a
better life. Absolutely, I would agree. And another thing I
think is that it's important to look at the science
about on subjects like this, because I would say, this
kind of stuff is usually the domain of things like
religion and common sense, you know, positive interactions and positive emotions,

(12:43):
and that's all well and good to deal with it
and in a religious way or just kind of deal
with it at a you know, gut feeling way, but
it's worth bringing a critical scientific lens to figure out
what's actually going on with these emotions, what are their
biological roots, Uh, what are the best ways to trigger
and sustain, like, how do they fit into our lives,
and how can we drive them to the benefit of humanity. Yeah,

(13:05):
and and hopefully all of this will be just a
good exercise for everyone in general, because I know from
from personal experience it's entirely possible to go through an
entire Thanksgiving holiday without actually engaging in the experience of
gratitude and thoughts or acts of gratitude. So maybe this
will force all of us to to rethink what gratitude
is and why we seemingly have a holiday that's all

(13:27):
about reminding us to be thankful, even if we don't
always actually act on that. So first of all, let's
just start with under the origins of gratitude, getting down
to the you know, the brass tacks of the matter.
We'll start with the old old Webster's definition gratitude is
a state of being grateful. That's not very helpful, all right,
We'll go deeper, and to be grateful is to be

(13:49):
appreciative of benefits received, expressing gratitude affording pleasure or contentment
or pleasing by reason of comfort supplied or discomfort alleviate
did so, it is being aware of your blessings, being
aware of benefits received, and more than just acknowledging that
they exist, being appreciative of them. So there's like a

(14:12):
positive emotion that coincides with acknowledging what has gone well
right now and considering all of this, and certainly more
so if you were already bringing in religious connotations, we
touched on the fact that sometimes gratitude is shall we say,
more cosmic. For instance, I can truly say that I'm
thankful to have been born in a time of such

(14:34):
scientific advancements, uh, you know, such relative global peace and
personal freedom. And I often come back to the old
phil Oaks folk song there but for Fortune that talks
about all these terrible things and saying, well they're but
for fortune, go you or I. Yeah. And And as
much as there, of course still is always lots of
things wrong in the world, you can appreciate the things

(14:57):
that have gone right. I mean, like whatever else bad
is going on, you can say, wow, I was able
to receive vaccines, you know, exactly. But a lot of
these are sort of by luck of the universe. I
exist at all, am conscious of my existence so at all,
or you know, despite a fair amount of nitpicking and
even some you know, major issues with the state of
world or even reality itself, we can say, well, I

(15:19):
am fortunate. So that's that's very you know, cosmic gratitude.
But then there's the idea of being grateful to someone
or to something, and and this is important as well,
and it can take many forms. Perhaps you are grateful
to your partner for all they do and for their love.
Perhaps you are grateful to your parents for their love
and support. Perhaps you're grateful to a friend or even

(15:39):
a stranger who did you a favor. Perhaps you're grateful
to an authority figure in your life, a boss, a
public figure who help you in some way, an artist
who created something that gave you joy, or a king
um you know. And indeed, perhaps you're you're grateful to
a deity for their perceived role in any of these
everyday blessings or the larger cosmic blessings we mentioned already. Yeah,

(16:01):
this is an interesting distinction. Uh, maybe looking at social
gratitude versus what you're calling like cosmic gratitude, because I
believe the biological function of gratitude as an emotion in
the primate brain is probably primarily social. Right, it's a
motivating emotion that encourages bonding and reciprocal cooperation between animals.

(16:25):
But in humans, it's clear that that it can escape
the bonds of its original social context and exist without
an object. Right, you can be grateful but not to
any person in particular, like you're talking about with this
cosmic gratefulness, or exist in relationship to things. Maybe there
is an object you're grateful to, but it's not another
animal or another person. It can just be a situation.

(16:47):
I find that really interesting. Uh, And I think there
are plenty of parallels with other emotions that have escaped
their original social significance in an animal context. You might
think of resentment in the negative side. Resentment, I think
also is primarily a social emotion as biological functions in
you know, regulating social groups and group dynamics. But it's

(17:08):
also possible for people to feel resentment towards no one
in particular, just sort of rather toward life for toward
general situations. Right Like, So, for instance, if if I
have back pain, I can resent my job and or
indoor my boss, because you know, if that job somehow
played into me injuring my back. If I believe in
a deity, I can resent my deity or you know, whatever,

(17:30):
the or the devil or whoever, for their role in
making my back hurt or allowing it to hurt in
the first place. Or I can for instance, be resentful
at natural selection in the state of human biology that
that frequently enables back pain to exist at all. You
can just have resentfulness without an object like and nobody
to be mad at here. But I'm so resentful. Yeah,

(17:51):
And I think the same is clearly true of gratitude.
I entirely agree with this idea of this cosmic feeling
of gratitude. And it's funny how that kind of thing
complicates our picture of of gratitude far beyond even the
kind you see like in the in the folk tales,
where most often gratitude manifests as like, Uh, you know,
a sort of a debt ode to someone. Someone has

(18:14):
done something nice for you, and you're going to find
a way to pay them back. Yeah, that's right, because
if there is an other involved in your gratitude, be
it an actual human person or a perceived deity, then
there may be well, this feeling of indebtedness. There is
a bond, there is something that needs to be repaid
in one form or another. And then there's clearly overlap
here between indebtedness and gratitude. Uh. And it really depends

(18:38):
on who you talk to who's doing the arguing. Some
say that they are essentially equivalent. Others, however, argue that
we're talking about two distinct emotional states. I was looking
at some various sources on this in the Debt of Gratitude,
disassociating gratitude and indebtedness by Watkins at All, published in
Cognition and Emotion in two thousand and six. The researchers

(18:58):
carried out a pair of exers. Ez Is insurmised that quote,
the debt of gratitude is internally generated and is not
analogous to an economic form of indebtedness. Okay, so they
come down on the side of it, these two things
being not equivalent. Another study I was looking at for
this one from Matthews and green Um looking at Me
Appreciating You. Self focused attention distinguishes between gratitude and indebtedness.

(19:23):
This was also an Incognition and Emotion but from two
thousand eight. In this the research has found that quote,
highly self focused individuals recalled increased indebtedness, but not gratitude
towards a benefactor relative to those in the control condition.
Self focused individuals also felt less commitment and closeness to
the benefactor. So if I'm understanding this correctly, Um and indeed,

(19:45):
these are all just arguments on the backup two experiments.
They're not gospel. Uh. Concerning gratitude, indebtedness comes down comes
into play more when we're considering ourselves as players within
a social system. Well, yeah, I mean, I can imagine,
for example, it seems perfectly plausible that you could have
person a Bob who is really into paying back what

(20:07):
he owes people. He borrows five dollars, He's going to
pay you back five dollars, right exactly. He always pays
his debts. But he might not be a person in
which you recognize much of this emotion that we call gratitude. Meanwhile,
you could have person b You could have Jeff over here,
who maybe is kind of flaky about paying back debt's
ode and doesn't keep a very clean ledger. That way

(20:29):
doesn't settle all these debts, but shows more of the
emotion we think of his gratitude. That that makes sense
to me, and I can very easily see those things
being disconnected from one another in social scenarios. Now here's
another paper. I was looking at a two thousand seven
paper in Motivation and Emotion from Joe N. Saying titled
the Effects of helper Intention on Gratitude and Indebtedness. And

(20:50):
this also experimented with the distinction and explore the effects
of helper intention on reactions to a favor. And basically
the subjects were asked to think about times they did
something nice, either within an ulterior motive or as an
act of just pure benevolence, and quote, participants felt significantly
more grateful when the helper had benevolent intentions. So a

(21:12):
lot of it would seem to come down to either
the express nature of the act and or the individual's
perception of it. So you could have people who feel
thankful because you know, the stranger gave me a cold
water bottle just out of kindness or uh, you know um.
Or they could say, oh, the bellman was so nice
to bring my luggage to my hotel room. Uh, and
they're grateful, not realizing they were supposed to tip that individual. Right.

(21:35):
It's all about you know, your perception. You know. Likewise,
you could feel indebted because your friend helped you move
and you know that they are going to move next week,
or you know, you could be something like, oh, that
stranger gave me a bottle of water, probably because they're
going to try to sell me something. I'm gonna have
to stand here and listen to them, you know, or
something like that. So you could you could read or
potentially misread any situation and lean more towards gratitude or indebtedness. Okay,

(22:00):
we totally know if you've watched a mob movie or
The Sopranos, that there are gifts that are purely menacing,
that that you can, like give somebody a gift or
give somebody cash or something like that, and the goal
is not to do something nice for them. It is
to to scare them, to signal to them that they
are indebted to you, and they can't you know, they

(22:21):
can't turn this down. It's more of a kind of
dominance move. When someone in a position of power um
asked for a favor, that sort of thing. It's entirely
different situation than if a normal person just asks, you know,
a friend or a family member for a favor. Well,
but but in this case, what I was talking about
is if a person in power does you a favor,

(22:42):
but you know, you're not going to feel gratitude if
you don't think that the favor was actually done out
of kindness, if you think the favor was done in
some way to try to dominate you or make a
point to you. Yes. Now, both of these ideas, though
no matter how connected they are, touch on two things
that are typically stressed in human culture. You should repay
your debts and you should show gratitude either in general

(23:04):
to a deity or deities and or two individuals. All right,
it's time to take a quick break, but we'll be
right back to discuss some research on gratitude. Alright, we're back.
So in considering, you know, cultural attitudes towards gratitude and
who should show gratitude towards, one of the big ones is,
of course, gratitude towards parents and family members. That kind

(23:28):
of makes sense. I mean, the entire act of raising
a child is doing a lot of favors that are
not immediately repaid, right, and and also you engage in
them generally because you don't expect them to be repaid. Yeah,
but but this is important business in human culture. Uh.
And in various cultures we see different models of it.

(23:49):
For instance, in Chinese traditions, there's the concept of filial
piety or shall and it is enormously important and in
many Eastern cultus as well. It's a concept grounded in
Daoist philosophy Confucian family values, and it concerns the undying
nature of the human soul, the dead live on in
the afterlife. It also entails continue efforts to not only

(24:13):
honor to see his family members, but to care for them,
to tend to their desires and even uh in some
models curry favor in order to avoid catastrophe, to maintain
balance and happiness for the living and for the dead. Um,
you know, it's a continued spirit lineage for a given family.
But we also see the basic form of this elsewhere
as well. A certain amount of respect and devotion is

(24:34):
old to elders, particularly one's own elders, and we see
shades of this and other cultures. The Greeks and Romans
put a great deal of emphasis on gratefulness to one's
parents and failure to honor. This was considered not mere ingratitude,
but impeity. Uh So we're talking, you know, the dire
breach of a bond that is often attributed to that
between a mortal and a god. And of course one

(24:55):
is reminded of the line from King lear right, how
sharper it is than a urban's tooth to have an
ungrateful child. I mean, the serpent's tooth doesn't make noise. Yeah, No,
I mean that is like, what why is it? I mean,
I don't think it's just like our personal pet peeves
like it is a widely recognized thing that one of

(25:17):
the most disgusting things to witnesses, like a particularly entitled
and ungrateful child. Well that's fine, Willy Wonka and the
chocolate factory. We see I think several generations of this, right,
the ungrateful child. I guess FRUA's fru cassalt one of
the ungrateful children. I don't know. I'm not a Willie
Wanka expert here now, I'm trying to at least one

(25:39):
of them is definitely positioned as an ungrateful child, and
and a lot of I want it's and no thank you's.
Right now. Of course, we realistically have to acknowledge that
relationships between children and parents is is often more complicated
than this, but still the trope, the idea of the
cultural emphasis remains. But in general, Judaism, chris Janity, and

(26:00):
Islam all stressed gratitude is being part of a good life.
It's also stressed in Hinduism and Buddhism and other major
faiths as well, and and often there's an emphasis put
on gratitude as expressed in prayer, absolutely, I think, and
as we get into the studies about the psychological benefits
of actively practicing gratitude. I think this is one of

(26:22):
the many arguments you could make that there are secular
psychological benefits to what you would normally see as prayer behaviors,
right right. And we see various philosophers and thinkers throughout
time chiming in on gratitude as well, generally in favor
of it. Um. So, just a taste of some of these, um,
and maybe we can go back and forth on these,

(26:43):
uh these, Joe, if you want to take the first one. Oh, okay,
So Epicurus said, do not spoil what you have by
desiring what you have. Not remember that what you now
have was once among the things you only hoped for,
all right. And then Cicero once said gratitude is not
only the greatest of virtues, but the parent of all others.
I think he's close. I think the parent of all

(27:05):
others is probably honesty, but gratitude right up there, somewhere
right below. I think gratitude fits in pretty well with
with the Stoic philosophy and you and you can see
this in the writings of Marcus Aurelius, where he said,
take full account of what excellencies you possess and ingratitude.
Remember how you would hanker after them if you had

(27:25):
them not Now, I was of course curious what Aristotle
had to say, and because he's always wrong. Well, and
you might not be surprised here, depending on how you
look at it. Uh So I've read different things about
Aristotle's approach to gratitude. On one hand, is pointed out
by Jacquelein of Pifer Merrill in Philanthropy Daily the Virtue

(27:48):
of Gratitude as the name of her piece, Aristotle did
not list gratitude as a virtue and actually listed several
traits that run opposite to the idea, such as having
a quote proper pride wasn't Aristotle also against mercy? He
didn't really like it. Yeah. On the other hand, the
Stanford Encyclopedia Philosophy points out that gratitude quote fits nicely

(28:12):
into Aristotle's picture of virtue as a mean between an
excess and a deficiency, with gratitude being a mean between
the vices of arrogant, prideful and envious ingratitude on one hand,
and the obsequiousness or servility of over gratitude on the other. Still,
I would say Aristotle not coming off as like the

(28:32):
the real poster child for gratitude. Well, I mean, I
think Aristotle was very much one day, he was kind
of obsessed with like with like justice and the ledger
being evenly settled in things, so like, you know, I
think he was against the idea of mercy or compassion
towards people who were receiving deserved or just suffering. And

(28:54):
I think he would probably likely hear be against um
feelings of gratitude that are disproport sin it to the
benefits received. All right, let's fast forward a bit to
some more recent thinkers. Okay, it looks like we got
Voltaire here, who said appreciation is a wonderful thing. It
makes what is excellent in others belong to us as well.
I really like that one. Uh. And then here's one

(29:16):
from C. S. Lewis. This is from the screw type letters. Uh.
And off hand, I don't remember if this is these
are the words of a demon or not, but quote
gratitude looks to the past, and love to the present.
Fear averaice, lust, and ambition look ahead. So to take
that for what it's worth. Now, now to come back
to the idea of a you know, sort of terrestrial

(29:37):
and cosmic gratitude, uh secular and religious thankfulness. There's a
wonderful two thousand fourteen Atlantic article titled Gratitude without God
that asks ask us, what do we to make of
gratitude when we remove the spiritual elements so key to
it in religious modes of life? And in this you
see Davis psychologist at Robert Emmons is quoted in the article,

(30:00):
and I think he sums it up rather nicely. Quote
we all begin life dependent on others, and most of
us in life dependent on others. If we are lucky
in between, we have roughly sixty years or so of
unacknowledged dependency. The human condition is such that throughout life,
not just at the beginning and end, we are profoundly
dependent on other people. Gratitude is the truest approach to life.

(30:24):
We did not create or fashion ourselves. We did not
birth ourselves. Life is about giving, receiving, and repaying. We
are receptive beings dependent on the help of others, on
their gifts and their kindness. I think that's lovely and
extremely true. Robert Emmons, of course, is a psychologist who's
deeply involved in research on gratitude. You see him all

(30:45):
over like the the UC Berkeley Greater Good Thing, which
studies a lot of like, you know, positive emotions and
things like that. He's all over that. So he does
a lot with UH emotions like gratitude. But I I
agree here, I mean I gratitude is fundamentally an emotional
state of honesty and realism, whereas a roughly converse emotion

(31:07):
like pride more often reflects delusion and self deception. Essentially,
none of the things about your life that you enjoy
could exist without the free gifts given by others in
the past and present. You're you know, the society you
live in, your education that made you the person you
are today, all the technology that you benefit from, the

(31:28):
culture that you love it, everything, everything there is a
gift from others in the past and in the present
to you. And to try to ignore this is just
factually deceptive, you know, to think like I deserve everything
good that I get and and it's all because of me.
I think exactly the same way that it feels good

(31:49):
to tell the truth instead of lying. It feels good
to be grateful for everything that's good. Yes, I would agree. Now,
Also interesting in this UH, this article um that I
that I quoted here the Gratitude without God from the
Atlantic In Uh, they they cite Michael McCulloch, a psychologist

(32:09):
at the University of Miami, who makes a case that
it may also be just hardwired into us social apes,
that we are traits for gratitude might be enforced through
natural selection. And McCulloch has has research gratitude before before
of you know, finding that the doing nice things for
people unexpectedly produces gratitude and then it's more likely that

(32:30):
we will respond in kind. Yeah. Uh yeah, And I
think there's been a lot of research on the dynamics
of of like social altruism and reciprocal behavior among social
species like like primates like us. How do you form
stable social groups of complex animals like us. One pretty
simple way to do it is to operate on the

(32:52):
basis not it's not perfectly represented like this, but the
basis of roughly reciprocal behavior. When somebody does something nice
for you, you do something nice for them back. And
if animals with traits for this evolved, they can have
stable social groups. Yeah, I think I think that makes sense.
And again we are coming back to the fact that
we are these social beings, and we depend so heavily

(33:16):
on on these social connections, though sometimes pride does at
least partially convinces that we that we were immune from
all of this. So indeed, there has been quite a
bit of research into gratitude and and so we're not
gonna attempt to include everything here, but I wanted to
start with just a few examples of recent studies from

(33:36):
the past few years before looking at more of like
a meta analysis of you know what in general we
know about gratitude. So there is a two thousand seventeen
University of Oregon study that found that journaling, uh, you know,
taking your thoughts, putting them onto paper, forcing them into
written language inspired altruism through an exercise of gratitude. Yeah,

(33:58):
and that's gonna be one thing that figures big into
scientific research on gratitude. You've got to find a way
to make it happen in the sort of lab conditions
or controlled conditions. And there are a couple of things
that are very common there that are referred to as
gratitude interventions. One big one is getting people to like
journal to write out their blessings and just like mentally

(34:20):
acknowledge them. Going through the list and being thankful, and
that appears to work pretty well. And another one is
getting somebody to acknowledge a person directly, like writing a
letter of gratitude to someone. Yes. Uh. And these of
these things don't work equally for everyone. Some people have
a disposition that's more toward gratitude to begin with, but

(34:41):
they do appear to be generally effective at triggering gratitude
and its subsequent benefits. It's something you can do that
will very likely change your emotional state, just to literally
sit down and think about your blessings. It looks like
it mostly works. Uh. Here's another one in two thou eighteen,
University of Chicago Booth School of Business. Because of course

(35:01):
gratitude is in every aspect of life, and of course
in the business sphere as well. How can you use
gratitude to extract money from other people? Well, this is
interesting that it ties into that, I think, the everyday experience,
because he said that they found that people tend to
underestimate the power of, say, a letter of gratitude. They also,
you know, commented that despite all the research and the

(35:22):
media coverage, and it is the you know, the popular
notion that gratitude is good. The public, you know, tends
do not exercise these exercises of gratitude enough through expressions
like this, through through like just a note of thank you.
That's what I was getting at earlier. I mean, on
one hand, it's it's not very surprising to say that, yes,
gratitude has strong psychological benefits. Practicing gratitude is really good,

(35:47):
and you should do it. That might be the conventional
wisdom anyway, But people don't. We don't act as if
it is. And and I kind of get from this
the fact that it's such a you know, it's a
business school of business paper. I'm getting like even from
like a macke Valiant sort of standpoint. They're not. It's
like you're not manipulating gratitude enough. But that kind of
like ties into our overall, you know, perhaps an overall

(36:10):
lack of gratitude. Maybe we're being ungrateful to our friends
in the business world. They're not always There might be
little elements of that. Here's another one. Two thousand eighteen,
researchers from Peking University used neuroimaging to demonstrate a possible
brain network involved in the translation of altruism into feelings
of thankfulness. So I mean, basically, we're setting on two

(36:32):
decades a plus of work that supports the long standing
idea that gratitude is a worthwhile virtue with positive effects
on health, happiness, and relationships and also tends to lessen uh,
negative emotional states like in the and materialism. So indeed,
there's a great deal of research out there about gratitude,

(36:53):
and I was, I was looking through a lot of it,
and I found a really good two thousand seventeen paper
by Laos at all and pls one and uh and
this did a lot of sort of meta analysis, sort
of catching us up on on what has occurred in
previous decades in the researching of gratitude and and a
lot of these do come down to these experiments that
you described already Joe, about you know, asking someone to

(37:15):
recount their blessings before you know it as part of
the experiment, or asking them to write a letter of gratitude.
So this paper, is the title indicates, was largely focused
on looking at the quote complex constellation of social emotions
people experience after practicing gratitude. But in doing so they
do a wonderful meta analysis of prior gratitude research, and

(37:36):
this is basically this is the short version of what
they lay out. So, first of all, numerous past studies
have proven that there are tangible positive benefits to gratitude.
I've listed some of these already, health, happiness, relationships, etcetera.
And then following up on these, additional studies looked to
ways to induce these feelings in experiments through gratitude exercises.

(37:59):
So there's about a decade that and then uh, there
are papers such as this one. They look more at
exactly what might be going on and how it factors,
you know, into the human experience, and uh, through their
own studies. In this paper, the researchers found that gratitude
exercises feel pleasant and mildly unpleasant at the same time,

(38:21):
which I think was is really insightful. This is something
that I I didn't even really think about, but then
after I read it, I'm like, well, that's that's exactly right. Yeah,
if when I'm when I'm engaging in an exercise of gratitude,
which you know it might be in the prayer. I've
gone to yoga classes where they do uh gratitude exercise
as well. Uh, they can feel a little bitter sweet,

(38:42):
because in contemplating what you have there and and what
has you know, the various aids that have been present
to help you get where you are in your life,
as well as the cosmic things in place. You know, you,
you end up at least partially contemplating uh, you know,
the situation of others and uh and indeed getting into

(39:02):
that there but for fortune kind of zone that we
discussed earlier. Yeah, I think there there are multiple reasons
that practicing gratitude, while very psychologically beneficial overall, it can
be bitter sweet. And of course one of the reasons
is acknowledging the misfortune of others while you acknowledge your
own fortune. I mean that that, of course, it doesn't
feel good to contemplate the fact that you have what

(39:25):
others do not have. But then also there's another thing,
which is just like, there's a certain part of you that,
even when you're trying to practice gratitude probably always wants
to be a bit narcissistic and entitled and think that well,
I you know, I just get what's coming to me,
all the good things coming my way, or because I
deserve them, and I'm so great and I've earned everything

(39:47):
I have. You know, people sometimes like to think that way,
and it's weird that So I think the research is
absolutely clear that actively practicing gratitude and acknowledging all of
the blessings that have come your way, being thankful for
what other people have done for you and for your
good fortune and luck, that has positive benefits and it
feels good. But if you are encouraged to do that,

(40:10):
if certain especially certain people with a kind of disposition
against gratitude, are encouraged to do things like that using
the wrong language or the wrong tone of voice, they
can often become incredibly defensive and defiant, like the suggestion
that they have benefited from privileges and blessings and stuff.
Do you know what I mean? Oh, absolutely, Yeah, there's

(40:31):
you know, obviously there's a lot of talk and culture
today about about the various privileges that we have and
checking your privilege, acknowledging your privilege, and and and and
factoring that into how you relate to others, how you
empathize with other people, which which is I think a
very important exercise and essential exercise. But yeah, at the

(40:51):
same time, like that's a way to really raise somebody's defenses. Absolutely.
I mean, I think I could be wrong, but what
I tend to imagine is going on there that even
though I think most people would acknowledge that it is
good to understand and think about the blessings you've received,
you know, the honored privileges that that you benefit from.
That if you are encouraged to do so by someone

(41:13):
that you don't see as sympathetic to you, you know,
if you're encouraged to do that by somebody you see
as maybe a potential enemy or stranger outsider, you get
kind of you just like put the walls up and
you're like, no, it feels like an attack. Yeah, And
I wonder if part of this, getting back to this
bittersweet aspect of of gratitude, is that it is placing

(41:34):
yourself into a state of vulnerability, which which is generally
something that's the kind of thing that is necessary for change,
that's necessary for uh, for for a lot of like
positive movements of of the of of of the mind
and the and our sense of identity, but it can
also be frightening. Also in this paper, they speculated that

(41:54):
this mixed emotional experience is perhaps more motivating than like
a purely positive of emotional experience would be uh. They write, quote, indeed,
it maybe this bittersweet state and the behaviors it elicits
that explain why gratitude exercises lead to downstream positive outcomes
pro sociality, health promoting behavior, etcetera, lending support to the

(42:18):
age old wisdom that gratitude is indeed a virtue. Right,
so it's not just like an emotion or an emotional state,
but it is actually motivating. Uh. We already talked about
the idea that gratitude is an emotion that maybe in
an evolutionary sense, promotes pro social behavior, promotes like in
group cooperation, reciprocal altruism with people you know, doing a

(42:39):
nice thing for people who you imagine would do a
nice thing for you, or have done a nice thing
for you. That of course is very important social behavior.
But health promoting behavior. That that's another really interesting one.
It does show up a lot in the research that
you practice gratitude, you're less likely to abuse your own
body in various ways. It's hard to imagine exactly what
the mechanism is there, but I can see it have

(42:59):
something to do with the kind of uh, the kind
of bittersweet self reflection brought on by understanding the things
you benefit from. Yeah, and I also I also think
there's probably a connection there to the I mean there
there is a connection between gratitude and altruism, and you
know some of them. We discussed some of that connection already,
but you can see where you could you could be
asked to feel the gratitude you're so you're you're thankful

(43:20):
for the food you have. You have enough food to
feed your family, right, and then you realize in doing
that that a lot of people cannot make this statement,
and then that may lead to them to the action,
to actually doing something like signing up for a meal
delivery program, participating in a canned food drive, or or
other acts of altruism. Yeah, I think that's entirely plausible. Now,
focusing just on the immediate psychological benefits of of of

(43:45):
practicing gratitude. I was watching a short talk by the U. C.
Davis psychologist Robert A. Emmons, who is deeply involved in
a lot of this gratitude research. I think we already
mentioned him earlier. So yeah, we read a quote from yeah, uh,
and he he just makes a number of points memerizing
some of the big takeaways from gratitude research and its
emotional benefits. One of the things he mentions that I

(44:06):
think is interesting is that under natural circumstances, states of
positive emotion quickly wear off. You know, like you you
you're happy because something good happened. You know, that can
be anything from you know, I loved one did something
nice for you, or you've got to raise at work
or whatever it is. You know, that leads to this
feeling of like, oh wow, you know the things are great.

(44:29):
Those emotional states wear off really fast. We're we're prone
to sort of like go back to baseline or or
pay attention to the new stimulus. But research indicates that
actively practicing gratitude sort of has the power to prolong
and sustain states of positive emotion. It prevents that wearing
off effect and and positive emotional states being supplanted by

(44:52):
novelty and your experience. Uh. And I think that's a
pretty straightforward effect, right, just like just like thinking about
your blessings allows you to enjoy them more. Another thing
he points out is that gratitude actively suppresses some negative
emotions and emotional states, not all, but some. Uh. And
the negative emotional states that he flags as as being

(45:12):
sort of blocked by practicing gratitude are envy, resentment, regret,
and depression. Another thing he mentions is that gratitude encourages
psychological resilience. That just means it that like dispositional gratitude,
if you if you train yourself to become a gratitude
disposed kind of person, it makes it easier to recover

(45:33):
when bad things happen to you and when you enter
negative emotional states. Uh. And then finally, of course that
this goes more to what we were talking about just
a minute ago. Gratitude strengthened social bonding and increases our
feeling of self worth. Uh. And I think the self
worth thing is very interesting because there's some kind of
perhaps ironic or or seemingly on its face self contradictory

(45:56):
thing going on with gratitude. It seems like gratitude simultane
enviously causes us to, you know, like be less self
focused and less narcissistic and less uh, less likely to
believe that, you know, we just deserve everything good that's
come our way, we earned it all. But on the
other hand, it does somehow make people feel more worthy.

(46:17):
I wonder if it is because on some level, like
our our most pronounced version of the egoic self, you know,
the most inflated version, which is going to vary from
individual to the individual. But that that that edifice that
we put out, you know that it is on some level,
even as we're saying it, we know that it is
an inflation, and acts of gratitude forced us to withdraw

(46:41):
that that that self balloon to to a more reasonable level.
That then we can feel a lot better about Yeah,
it's true like that. You might feel better thinking about
your own accomplishments if you're more humble and considering what
they are, right, because you've come down from I am
a golden God too, I'm an okay person, and and
you're like, yeah, I can stand behind that that statement.

(47:02):
I'm my hands aren't shaking when I say it. But
I've got another possible theory. This isn't something that that
I've read asserted elsewhere, but it sort of ties into
what we were just thinking about. And I'm wondering if
there's a tie in to an extrapolated version of something
known as the Ben Franklin effect. I think maybe we
should take a break and then we can come back
and talk about this, all right, we'll do it. All right,

(47:27):
we're back, And I have to admit I kind of
feel like I want to ring a bell or have
a sound effect anytime Ben Franklin shows up in either
stuff to blow your mind or invention, because it does
seem like he'll pop in like a special guest star,
like a frequent special guest star in a sitcom, like
suddenly he's here. What's he gonna do? Is he gonna
experiment with something? Is he going to, uh, you know,
share some wisdom? What's his role? Franklin effect? Well, I

(47:52):
kind of can't you know. I don't love all the
so called founding fathers equally, but I think maybe I'm
sort of a you might call a Franco file. I like.
I like Franklin. All right, Well, how does he tie
into gratitude? All right? So this is a principle known
as the Ben Franklin effect Franklin Franklin effect. And here's

(48:14):
a very simple version of it. You're more likely to
do a favor for me if you've already done me
a favor in the past. It's named after a story
Benjamin Franklin tells in his autobiography about how when he
was serving as a clerk in the Pennsylvania General Assembly,
and this was before the American Revolution, this would be
in the colonial administration of the mid seventeen thirties. Uh.

(48:36):
Franklin tells how one year a new member of the
Assembly shows up and makes this long speech against Franklin's
candidacy for reappointment to the clerkship. So we've got like
an anti Franklin it in the Assembly who's up there
railing against Franklin. And Franklin evaluates this guy, and he
judges that actually, this guy would make a good ally

(48:57):
in the future because, uh, he he's likely to have
a lot of influence, he's wealthy, he's well educated, and
he's got a lot of political talents. So Franklin wants
to turn this enemy into a friend. But he also
doesn't want to do anything humiliating or pay any quote,
pay any servile respect to him, which, you know, I
admire Franklin for admitting that like petty resistance. Right. So

(49:20):
he comes up with a plan to ingratiate himself to
this guy, and he writes describing it here quote having
heard that he had in his library a certain very
scarce and curious book. I wrote a note to him
expressing my desire of perusing that book, and requesting he
would do me the favor of lending it to me
for a few days. He sent it immediately, and I

(49:43):
returned it in about a week with another note expressing
strongly my sense of the favor. When we next met
in the house, he spoke to me, which he had
never done before, and with great civility, And he ever
after manifested a readiness to serve me on all occasions,
so that we became great friends. Our friendship continued to
his death. This is another instance of the truth of

(50:04):
an old maxim I had learned, which says, he that
has once done you a kindness will be more ready
to do you another than he whom you yourself have obliged.
And it shows how much more profitable it is to
prudently remove than to resent return and continue inimical proceedings.
And that, of course, that's that's certain, very scarce and
curious book was, of course the necronomic. I think so

(50:28):
it's it's how Franklin learned the electrostatic secrets of azzof
so Franklin's observation can be generalized if you want to
make somebody like you, to make them treat you better,
get them to do you a small favor. After somebody
does you a small favor, their feelings about you become
more amicable and they become more likely to treat you

(50:49):
better in other ways in Franklin effect. So a couple
of questions that this is just a historical anecdote. First
of all, is this effect generally real? Can it be
empirically confirmed? And if so, how does this tie back
into gratitude as we were talking about earlier. So the
first question is their empirical evidence for the Ben Franklin effect.

(51:11):
I think the scientific evidence is not overwhelming, but there
are a few studies and they do seem to support
the effect. One famous one was from the nineteen sixties,
I think it's from sixty nine in the journal Human
Relations by Jekker and Landy called liking a person as
a function of doing him a favor. And the authors
here did this complicated procedure with a with with having

(51:33):
participants go into a sham experiment that involved payouts of
small payouts of money at the end of the experiment
uh and they had different conditions where experiment ers or
somebody acting on behalf of the experiment, or would ask
participants to do favors for them, including returning the small
amounts of money that they had won for participation in

(51:54):
the experiment, Like there was a ruse where they'd say,
actually funding his run out and and this is your payment.
But uh, I'm having to fund these experiments out of
my own pocket, so I would really appreciate if you
would return the money. And then they also tried asking
for this favor through an intermediary like a department secretary,
and the authors did indeed find that after doing somebody

(52:16):
a favor, participants, on average reported liking that person more
than they did before, more than they did if they
didn't do the person a favor. The Ben Franklin effect
was supported by the experiment, but there are some interesting nuggets.
First of all, it did not help for a person
to ask for a favor through an intermediary or have
somebody else asked for a favor on your behalf. Only

(52:39):
asking directly seemed to create the effect here. Well that
that would make sense, like that is the formation of
the social bond, must be a person to person. Yeah,
I think that sort of makes sense. Uh. The Experimenters
also manipulated the magnitude of the favor to see if
this made a difference. Does doing somebody a bigger favor
make you like them more than doing them a smaller favor.

(53:02):
They called this the magnitude of concession hypothesis, and they
expected it to be the case, but they were wrong.
It appears that if I ask you for a favor
and you do it for me, you will probably like
me more than you did before. But there is no
evidence that doing me a bigger favor makes you like
me more than doing a smaller favor would. So, based
on the study, I think it makes sense if you're

(53:22):
trying to get somebody to like you ask them to
do you a small favor. Of course, in this I
know everybody is now thinking back to times that friends
and co workers asked small favors, and your your second
guessing and wondering if they were gaming you. Were they
gaming you? Yes, they've gotten me. They didn't want to
read that book, They just wanted to mess with me.
Uh so, interesting question like this does appear to be

(53:46):
empirically true. If it is in fact a robust effect
and generalizable, what explains it? Why are we like this.
There are a couple of main explanations that have been floated.
One is just sort of like a social effect that
the act of requesting a favor humanizes you in the
eyes of a person to whom you made the request,

(54:06):
Like it makes you just appear more sympathetic if you
come asking for something. This This makes perfect sense because
I feel like when we dislike someone, we tend to
formulate a very simple model of who they are and
what they're about, and generally it will boil down to, like,
you know, a few impulses or ideas regarding their personality

(54:27):
or character. And this add adds a a mundane element
into the mix. That is, it's perhaps is like adding
adding water to a strong beverage dilutes the uh, the
poison a bit. Yeah. I think that's a good way
of explaining it, and I think this explanation is somewhat
supported by by some of the research, but not all
of it. There's another explanation, which is the cognitive dissonance explanation. Basically,

(54:53):
the idea here is that it's hard to mentally reconcile
having done something nice for somebody youth think you don't like,
so the brain resolves this incongruity by updating its opinion
of the recipient in a positive way. That makes sense. Now,
we'll come back to these explanations in a minute. I
just wanted to look real quickly at another study that

(55:15):
investigated the ben Franklin effect. This was by you Nia
in the Journal of Social Psychology in twenty sixteen. Does
a favor request increase liking towards the requester? Uh? And
this found more evidence of the ben Franklin effect. Quote.
In an experiment, both Japanese and American participants who were
asked for help from a confederate increase their liking of

(55:36):
the confederate relative to the baseline. Social impression of the
confederate and perceived closeness of the relationship also increased relative
to baseline. However, there was an interesting twist. There was
no measurable increase when you do a favor for somebody
without them asking, So it seemed like at least in
this experiment, again might not be generalizable, but in this

(55:57):
study it was the act of asking for the favor
that was crucially important in securing the change of attitude.
If you just do somebody a favor without them asking,
it doesn't seem to change anything alright, So, so it's not.
For instance, if you come up to your boss and
you're like, hey, here's here's a good book. You should
read this, you should borrow it. Yeah, I'm gonna lend
it to you. Not gonna have the same effect if

(56:18):
the boss came to you and said, hey, can I
buy that book? Right? If this one is the more
generalizable effect, it would be that you're you're more likely
to like the boss more if they ask you. Um. So,
these effects would seem to support the humanization explanation rather
than the cognitive dissonance reduction explanation. But there's other research
in favor of the general idea behind the cognitive dissonance

(56:39):
reduction interpretation, showing that we tend to form our opinions
of people in ways that justify the ways we have
already treated them. For example, there are studies showing that
if you force people by experimental conditions to insult and
say mean things to a person's face, you will subsequently
find that the people who were forced to say the

(56:59):
mean thing is like the people they insulted, less than
they did before, less than they would on average otherwise. Um,
and so I think this fits pretty well with everyday experience,
like how often have you noticed Bob do something thoughtlessly
harmful to Jeff and then afterwards, when forced to think
about the fact that he did something harmful to Jeff,

(57:20):
subsequently like start coming up with reasons why Jeff is
trash and he deserved it. And I feel like I've
I've read examples of this in workplace scenarios as well,
like what happens when employers are, you know, forced to
some degree to employe harsher measures on employees, such as
head count reductions or you know, the removal of benefits

(57:41):
that sort of thing, and then like there's this sometimes
there's this justification process that moves in. It's exactly like this, right,
you justify your maltreatment by revising your opinions of these
people and making them seem worse in your own mind.
And that would fit with the cognitive dissonance reduction model.
And if that model of the Ben Franklin effect has
any truth to it, I think it would seem to

(58:03):
fit with models of the self similar to like Michael
Kazaniga and Joseph Ladue's left brain interpreter theory. The idea
that our self comes from a part of the brain
in the left hemisphere that observes our behavior and then
tells itself a story to try to make sense of it.
In other words, you don't cause your actions, your body acts,

(58:25):
and then you tell yourself a narrative to make sense
of it. Wow. You know this is one of those
things where you you you can apply this to the
mistreatment of of any group of people throughout history, and
you can see this kind of how this kind of
feedback effect works. Oh yeah, I think that this absolutely
has broad like social and political ramifications. You can see
it happening when when when one group inflicts pain on

(58:48):
another group, there's often an accompanying dehumanization of the group
that's getting the pain inflicted on them. And I think
that's that's probably a cognitive dissonance reduction thing. It's coming
up with narratives that just by the bad behavior. And
uh so, yeah, when when your actions and your feelings
about a person don't match up, one solution under this

(59:09):
theory to reduce this friction in your brain is just
to update your feelings about the person. So if you
treated somebody nice, you start to like them more. If
you treated somebody bad, you start to like them less. Now,
bringing it all back to the to the subject matter
at hand, why did I bring this up in the
context of discussing gratitude. It's simply because I was wondering

(59:29):
if practicing gratitude interventions generalizes the Ben Franklin effect by
turning it inward, if by like observing the ways that
the world has treated you nicely, that it can have
positive psychological effects by sort of like self been franklin
ing and seeing yourself as well, maybe there are ways

(59:52):
in which I'm worthy of good fortune. Al Right, so
instead of suddenly changing your opinion I've been Franklin, who
who asked for this the lending of this book. Yeah,
you feel better about the world, about individuals, about uh,
you know, these various mundane and cosmic forces that we
contemplate when we exercise gratitude. Yeah, exactly. So I'm not

(01:00:16):
sure that that's what's operative here, but I wonder about that,
and I would be interested if somebody could could find
ways to like test this explanation hypothesis sort of is
practicing gratitude does it lead to cognitive dissonance reduction strategies
in the brain that resolve toward an updated view of
self worth and and uh you know, and and fitting

(01:00:38):
in with the cosmic order and with your friends and
family and all everything else around you. But then again,
I mean, I think this is we already mentioned this,
but it's complicated by the fact that, at the same
time that gratitude seems to increase feelings of self worth,
it like specifically also asks you to not feel like
you deserve everything good that's ever happened you and you

(01:01:00):
know you just earned it all on your own. Uh.
And I think it's that tension that makes gratitude such
an interesting emotion. Yeah, yeah, And you know, I know
that some people listening this might think, all right, now
I have all these selfish reasons to engage in gratitude.
But on one hand, that's fine, because we were talking
about with this feedback between you know, between between action

(01:01:21):
and thought and uh and so forth, It's like, even
if your initial motivation is self selfish, it feels as
if the uh you know, the complex interplay here will
take over. Um, you may enter into it selfishly, but
then you know, assuming you know, there's uh, you know,
typical neurological conditions here, the gratitude will take over. Like

(01:01:44):
the the the effects seems to be potent enough. Uh
and and part of the human experience in a broad sense,
so that you uh, you know, for whatever reason you
say yes to it. Uh, it will do its thing
once you let it into you totally gratitude, humility, fake
it till you make it. Yeah. Yeah. Well of course.
The other thing too, is that we speak of gratitude exercises,

(01:02:07):
and I think you can think of them like exercise.
You don't want to run on a treadmill once a
year at the end of Thanksgiving, right you? You? And likewise,
you don't want to just exercise gratitude once a year
or twice or a year or whatever. Like most of
the research seems to say that it didn't. It needs
to be something that is engaged with on a regular basis. Uh,

(01:02:28):
you know, it's to sort of refresh the psyche. I
will say this is one where the overall gist of
the research fits very much with my own anecdotal experience.
I I try whenever I remember, and I just succeed
pretty often to actively practice gratitude. Uh. And I guess
this won't be unusual to a lot of people who
have like religious practices right regularly, you know, like pray

(01:02:50):
and thank God for their blessings or some equivalent of that. Uh.
You know, I I do a secular kind of thing.
I like to just when I can remember to write
down or say out loud nice things that I have
benefited from and recognize them and take stock. And I
will say it is a in my experience, an extremely
useful psychologically cleansing exercise. Yeah. And in our household, we

(01:03:13):
regularly have family meetings where each of we go around
and you have to say hi, you have to say,
you know, what was the highlight of your day, what
was the challenge of your day? And also what are
you looking forward to? And what are you thankful for?
And uh, And I think that's a go good way
to go about it, particularly if you you have a
you know, family scenario and you know, perhaps a small child.
Like that's a level of of thankfulness exercise that I

(01:03:36):
think is very achievable. I think that's probably I mean,
I'm not a child psychologist or anything, but I think
that's got to be incredibly important for a child to
see that kind of behavior modeled and to participate in it.
I mean as we were saying earlier, like, there's nothing
more disgusting than seeing a really ungrateful child, Like even
though you know, we were all like that where we

(01:03:56):
had those If you observe a child at some point
or another, you will they're of an ungrateful child because
they are they are learning all of this social complexity.
It's a natural tendency, but it's one of the gratefulness
I think is one of the most important things for
children to be socialized into as early as possible. Yeah,
all right, we're gonna go and close it up there.
But you know, obviously this is an episode that everyone

(01:04:19):
is going to have some feedback on, so we would
love to hear from everyone else about your relationship with
gratitude you think about it, uh, your relationship with Thanksgiving
even you know, hopefully we've provided some you know, from
food for thought as you engage in this year's feast.
In the meantime, if you want to check out other
episodes of Stuff to Blow your Mind, head, don't over
to Stuff to Blow your Mind dot com. That's where

(01:04:40):
we'll find them all. You also find them wherever you
get your podcasts and wherever that happens to be just
make sure you subscribe to ensure you get future episodes,
and also leave us a nice review if you like that.
That helps us out. Um all, if you wanted to
check out our other show, Invention, uh, that's an Invention
pod dot com And indeed Benjamin Franklin I think has
shown up in some epis, so it's there as well.

(01:05:01):
And if you want a little uh sci fi horror
for your holiday listening, uh, the second oil age. All
the episodes are out, so you can binge that puppy now. Oh.
In shirts, I should also mention, uh, if you go
to stuff to Blow your Mind dot com, you'll find
a tab for our merch store, and indeed there are
shirts there with things like squirrels and basilists and our logo.

(01:05:22):
And there's a new shirt as well as kind of
a treasure map kind of scenario. I think I think
it was from our Sea Monster Sea Monster Sea Monster shirt,
So a new one of those to check out. And
I believe there are some Thanksgiving Black Friday deals in
play as well, so now's a good time to pick
something up. If you are so inclined, absolutely dive into
the merch pit and mash as hard as you can.

(01:05:44):
And of course one more thing, since we were talking
about gratitude, really have to express our gratitude to you,
the listeners, because without you, none of this is really possible.
It's true though, UH and I as always express my
great gratitude, our great gratitude to our excellent audio producer
Seth Nicholas Johnson, who makes it all possible absolutely. If

(01:06:05):
you would like to get in touch with us with
feedback on this episode or any other, to suggest a
topic for the future, or just to say hello, you
can email us at contact at stuff to Blow your
Mind dot com. Stuff to Blow Your Mind is a
production of iHeart Radios. How Stuff Works. For more podcasts

(01:06:26):
from my Heart Radio is at the iHeart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.