Thanks for Nothing: Expressing Gratitude Invites Exploitation by Competitors

Economic exchanges such as negotiations, ultimatum games, and deception games are characterized as mixed-motive interactions in which individuals must decide when to focus on their self-interested outcomes and when to focus on joint outcomes with their counterparts (Dana, Cain, and Dawes 2006; Gino and Moore 2008). Social norms of competition are salient in these economic exchanges, and people are often motivated to claim value for themselves (Larrick and Wu 2007; Loschelder et al. 2016). Individuals typically act in accordance with their own interests because they obtain personal material gains or emotional benefits (Barasch et al. 2014; Zlatev and Miller 2016). A number of interpersonal factors has been shown to influence self-interested decisions, including trust (Lount et al. 2008), identity (Bryan et al. 2013), and - most relevant to the current work - emotion (Gino and Pierce 2009). Considerable research has focused on the benefits of gratitude. For example, feeling gratitude has been linked with prosocial behavior (McCullough et al. 2001), trust (Dunn and Schweitzer 2005), and personal responsibility (Chow and Lowery 2010). Interestingly, no prior work has investigated the potential negative consequences of gratitude. This is a surprising omission because gratitude is commonly expressed in social interactions, and selfish preferences and behavior frequently occur in economic exchanges. We explore whether expressions of gratitude trigger self-interested behavior. In social exchanges, individuals pay attention to social signals that communicate their counterparts’ motives to cooperate or compete (Adams et al. 2015; Galinsky and Schweitzer 2015). One important social signal is emotional expression. Emotional expressions provide insight into the cognitive appraisals and motives that commonly accompany the emotional experience (Ames and Johar 2009; Barasch et al. 2016). We extend the emotions-associal-information model (Van Kleef 2009; Van Kleef, Homan, and Cheshin 2012) and identify a strategic inference that individuals frequently make about their opponents based on their expressions of gratitude. Prior research has found that in cooperative relationships, people make inferences about the communal strength of the relationship when they interact with a partner who expresses gratitude (Lambert et al. 2010). Based on gratitude expressions, individuals infer that their partner is more caring about the welfare of others.