Gratitude

This post is based on an important book by David DeStono titled How Gratitude Can Help Us Help Ourselves.

At a psychological level, gratitude isn’t about the past; it’s about the future. It pushes people to work in the moment to benefit what is to come. It’s an extremely active state, not a passive one. It influences decisions about what to do next.

Here is the difference between feeling grateful and feeling indebted. Damn, now I have to get you something. Sometimes receiving a gift or a favor makes your heart swell with gratitude; other times it can lead to an annoying sense of responsibility. How you value the gift or favor is the deciding factor. What unifies experiences of gratitude is the receipt of something one desires that comes at a cost to someone else.

We’re grateful when we feel others have invested in us, which makes us willing to return the favor in the future. Sociologist George Simmer captured it best when he likened gratitude to the moral memory of humankind; it doesn’t let you forget you owe someone something. Whether you’re paying people back for their “investment” in you with money, time, or effort, gratitude nudges you to forestall or divert your own gains in the moment in the service of building or maintaining beneficial relationships for the long term. Dr. DeStono urges us to think of it this way. A failure to show gratitude is often taken as an affront by someone who went out of their way to do something nice for you. And as affronts accrue, relationships die. That’s why even if people don’t truly feel grateful, there is a social norm to fake it: to say “thank you” and appear appreciative. But the real power of gratitude doesn’t come only from its expression; it comes from its shaping of behavior.

If gratitude encourages cooperation through self-control, there is a straightforward prediction. When people feel grateful, they should devote more effort to help someone else, even if that help entails less than pleasant actions. So, how can one research this topic? If you want to know how gratitude affects people, you can’t just ask them. Work by Daniel Gilbert and Timothy Wilson has shown that not only are people poor at accurately predicting what they’ll feel in response to future hypothetical situations, they’re even worse as guessing how those feelings will affect their decisions. So asking someone what they’d do if they felt grateful is a scientific dead end. Examining how an emotion impacts decisions requires getting people to feel that emotion in real time and then seeing what they do when true costs and benefits—time, money—are on the line. But how do you make people feel grateful in the confines of a research lab?

The researchers realized that for people to feel grateful they first had to get stuck with a problem; they had to own it. Only after that when they were feeling the despair, could some elicit gratitude by swooping in to help them out of their predicament.

The researchers brought people into the lab two at a time and sat them down in adjacent cubicles. One of the two was an actual participant, the other a confederate. They were set to work completing a computerized task that was designed specifically to be long and boring. At the end of the task, people were led to believe that their score would appear on the computer monitor for the researcher to record. The only catch was that, unbeknownst to the participants, the computer they were working on was rigged to crash right as it was supposed to be calculating the final score. When it did so, there was an audible groan or expletive that brought the participant’s plight to the researcher’s attention. Here she’d inform the participant that unfortunately he’d have to redo the onerous task in its entirety. This pronouncement usually brought on more groans or expletives.

The participants believed that they were stuck and they were in for another twenty minutes of effortful tedium. The person sitting in the next cubicle was a confederate of the researchers. Her computer didn’t have technical issues and on getting up to leave she stopped, looked at the true participant and said something along the lines of “Yikes! That’s terrible. My computer didn’t crash. I wonder why yours did? Hmm.” She looked at her watch and said, “I do have to run to my campus job, but let’s see if I can help figure this out. I’m pretty good with computers.” Then she’d start playing with the cords and keyboard, during which time she would surreptitiously hit a key to start a countdown for the computer to come back to life. When it did, one could usually see the gratitude on people’s faces. And to back it up, the relieved souls almost always reported feeling a good deal of gratitude when their emotions were subsequently measured.

The grateful participants left the lab and headed to the building exit. But before they got there, they came upon the person who had helped them fix their computer a few minutes before. This confederate, who now appeared to be collecting data for a class project of her own, would ask the approaching participants if they could help her out. She needed people to complete a bunch of psychological tests. If they agreed, she’d sit them down to work in a room, saying the more time they were willing to devote to completing the tedious tests, the more help it would be. When they were done all they had to do was leave their work in a folder.

The researchers compared the amount of time grateful people spent working to help the confederate compared with that spent by people in the control group (who were in a neutral emotional states as they did the same experiment without their computer crashing), there was, not surprisingly, a dramatic difference. Those who felt gratitude made more effort to help their benefactor, they spent 30% more time working on the tests. Moreover gratitude was directly linked to perseverance in a dose-dependent way. It wasn’t simply knowing that someone had previously helped them that led people to work harder. Rather, it was the level of gratitude they felt in response to that a help; as their level of gratitude increased, so did their efforts and time on the task.

Although the researchers were pleased with the results, they still had a nagging worry: it was possible that people helped the confederate not because they were grateful, but simply because they felt they owed her a debt. To check whether it was truly gratitude rather than a sense of indebtedness, they ran the experiment again but with one key change. Now the person who asked the participants for help as they were leaving the building wasn’t the person who had previously offered to help in the lab bout a complete stranger (an actor working for the researchers). Still the effect was replicated.

Adam Grant of the Wharton business school has researched the important role giving plays in success. In his analysis of givers versus takers—people who are willing to devote time and effort to help others versus those who benefit from help but refuse to return the favor he found that on most every metric of success givers, over the long haul come out on top. As in most cases there can be too much of a good thing; giving repeatedly and unconditionally can make one a doormat. But outside of this aberrant case, generosity ensures that you’ll be valued and paid back in spades. One major benefit of gratitude is that it offers perhaps the fastest and easiest route to instill a readiness to give—one that does not rely on force of will and resists being subverted by motivated, selfish reasoning.

How Emotions Are Made

“HOW EMOTIONS ARE MADE” is the title of a revolutionary book by Lisa Feldman Barrett.  It’s Subtitle is “The Secret Life of the Brain.”  It is indeed a revolutionary book as it debunks longstanding theories of emotions and substitutes for them a new theory based on detailed experiments and data.  Daniel Gilbert wrote, “A brilliant and original book by the deepest thinker about this topic since Darwin.”

For two-thousand-years the assumption has been that we all have emotions built-in since birth.  “They are distinct, recognizable phenomena inside us.  When something happens, whether it’s a gunshot or a flirtatious glance, our emotions come quickly and automatically.  We broadcast emotions by way of smiles, frowns, scowls, and other  characteristic expressions that anyone can easily recognize.  Our voices  reveal our emotions through laughter, shouts, and cries.”

The classical view of emotion posits that there are circuits of particular sets of neurons for different emotions.  Emotions were thought to be a kind of brute reflex, very often at odds with our rationality.  Our rationality was supposed to control our emotions to keep us from acting out too strongly.

Dr Barrett notes that this view of emotions has been around for millennia in various forms.  “Plato believed a version of it.  So did Hippocrates, Aristotle, the Buddha, Rene Descartes, Sigmund Freud, and Charles Darwin.  Psychologist Steven Pinker, Paul Ekman, and the Dalai Lama also offer descriptions of emotions based on this classical view.  The classical view is found in virtually every introductory college textbook on psychology, and in most magazine and newspaper articles that discuss emotion.  Preschools throughout America hang posters displaying the smiles, frowns, and pouts that are supposed to be the universal language of the face for recognizing emotion.  Facebook even commissioned a set of emoticons inspired by Darwin’s writings.”

Dr. Barrett continues, “And yet…despite the distinguished intellectual pedigree of the classical view of emotion, and despite its immense influence in our culture and society, there is abundant scientific evidence that this view cannot possibly be true.  Even after a century of effort, scientific research has not revealed a consistent, physical fingerprint for even a single emotion.  This notion also held that emotions were universal.  Regardless of where or when people lived, they experienced the same emotion.

Dr Barrett concedes that there are experiments that offered some evidence for the classical view, but many more cast the classical view in doubt.  She presents detailed research in the book that compels the reader to conclude that the classical view is flawed.  For example, emotions vary across cultures, much like languages will vary their vocabularies to reflect the environment in which they reside.

Of course, having debunked the classical view, it is incumbent on the critic to propose something better.  Dr. Barrett calls this view the theory of constructed emotions.  These emotions are constructed on the basis of our interoceptive environments.  She presents a convincing argument that our emotions are built upon our interpretation of our internal environments, that is analogous to the manner in which we develop an understanding of the external world.

Readers of the healthy memory blog should be aware that we do not experience the external world directly.  Rather we develop concepts and models on the basis of what our senses receive from the external world.  In other words, emotions are based on what we feel, that is how we interpret what we receive from our interoceptive environment.  Emotions are interpretations of our interoceptive conditions.  In other words we learn our emotional concepts in an analogous manner to how we learn about the external world.  We have an energy budget and this budget affects feelings of hunger and other bodily conditions.

Dr. Barrett provides a personal anecdote to illustrate how constructed emotions work.  When she was a graduate student a fellow male graduate student asked her out at the end of the day.  Although she had no feelings for this guy, she was tired and thought it would be a good way to kill the evening.  While they were dining, she thought she was beginning to fall for him.  Nothing further happened and she went home and fell asleep exhausted.  The next morning she woke up with the flu and remained in bed for several more days.  Apparently she had misinterpreted her interoceptive environment.  What she had originally interpreted as incipient feelings of love, were really incipient feelings of the flew virus.

Understanding Beliefs

Understanding Beliefs is a book by Nils J. Nilsson in The MIT Press Essential Knowledge Series.  Perhaps a better title for the book would be “How We Should Believe,”  the reason for this should become clear by the end of this post.  Nilsson is one of the founders of artificial intelligence, and putting the concept of belief into computer science is quite valuable.

He does not work entirely  in the domain of artificial intelligence as he notes contributions from psychologists and neuroscientists.  He invokes Kahneman’s concepts of System One and System Two processes that have been discussed previously in the healthy memory blog.  System One processes run off more or less automatically.  System Two processes are more in the vein of what is regarded as thinking and require mental effort.  Our beliefs are processed automatically through System One and there is little evidence of additional brain activity..  When information contradicts our beliefs, the brain becomes active and if not immediately revoked, System 2 and effortful processing is engaged to deal with the conflicting belief.

Nilsson discusses his own beliefs.  He does not believe that we ever have contact with an external world.  Rather we form concepts or beliefs based on the sensory inputs from an external world and the subsequent cognitive activity.  Moreover, these beliefs are weighted in terms of probabilities.  Nothing is certain.  That is, there are no beliefs with values of 0.0 or 1.0, regardless of how strongly the belief or disbelief is felt.   My views are identical.  These views are common among scientists and philosophers.  Here are some exemplary quotes:

“Objects” do not exist independently of conceptual schemes  We cut up the world into objects when we introduce one of another scheme of description.”  Hilary Putnam, philosopher.

“There was no way to hook up ideas with things…because ideas—mental representations—do not refer to things; they refer to other mental representations.”  Louis Menand, author, referring to thoughts of the philosopher C.S. Pierce.

“There is no quantum world.  There is only an abstract physical  description.  It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to found out how nature is.  Physics concerns what we can say about nature.”  Niels Bohr, physicist.

“The physicist constructs what he terms the physical world, a concept which arises from a peculiar combination of certain observed facts and the reasoning provoked by their perception.”  Robert Lindsay and Henry Margenau, physicists.

Nilsson advocates the scientific method as being the gold standard for confirming or rejecting beliefs.   When beliefs are modified, probabilities are adjusted, but beliefs are no entirely confirmed or discounted.  Near the beginning of the eleventh century, al_Haytham, an Islamic scholar who lived in Basra and Cairo, wrote the Book of Optics,which included a theory of vision and a theory of sight.  According to one authority, “Ibn al-Haytham was the pioneer of the modern scientific method.  His book changed the meaning of the term “optics” and established experiments as the norm of proof in the field.  His investigations were not based on abstract theories, but on experimental evidence, and his experiments were systematic and repeatable.  Unlike the Greeks, in his theory of vision rays of light came from the objects seen rather than from the eyes that see them.

Some of the European contributors to the development of the scientific method are Robert Grosseteste (c. 1125-1253), Roger Bacon (c. 1214-1294), Galileo (1564-1642), Francis Bacon (1561-1626), Rene Descartes (1596-1650), and, of course, Isaac Newton(1643-1727).

Problems arise when the problem is how to change erroneous beliefs.  The default for people is what they already believe, and much effort is involved in changing beliefs.  Moreover, we tend to seek out information that confirms rather than disconfirm our beliefs.  The internet has exacerbated this problem.  Different sites cater to different beliefs and we tend to search for information that confirms our beliefs.

The psychologist Daniel T. Gilbert describes two separate mental activities for processing a new piece of information, comprehension and assessment.  Assessment involves comparing  what is comprehended with other information.  It is much easier to reject than to accept information that does not correspond with existing beliefs.  Moreover, people do not like to suspend judgment.  Closure is preferred.  However, doubt us a valuable defense against belief traps.

Great minds can embrace doubt  The physicist Richard Feynman said, “I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing—I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing that to have answers that might be wrong.  I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things but I’m not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don’t know anything about.”

I fear that if we contrasted what  Feynman said with the typical individual on the street, we would find that most people have definite opinions about many things the know nothing about.  And many of these beliefs fly in the face of accepted scientific opinion—evolution for example.

Nilsson believes that the scientific method offers the best way discovered so far to invent  and evaluation beliefs.  And he believes that the best antidote to belief traps is to express our belies to the reasoned criticisms of others.  But as you should remember from the previous healthy memory blog post on belief, that beliefs are extremely difficult to change.  The viability of Nilsson’s  remedies will be discussed in the next healthy memory blog post.

© Douglas Griffith and healthymemory.wordpress.com, 2015. Unauthorized use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this blog’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Douglas Griffith and healthymemory.wordpress.com with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.