Intergroup Status and Gratitude, 2020

Across two studies, 801 participants from the United States were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to participate in an online study investigating expectations about gratitude expressions as a function of thankers' and helpers' races and observers' social dominance orientation (SDO). 775 of those participants remained after excluding 25 participants who failed an English test and 1 participant who failed both attention checks, with 393 participants from Study 1a (Mage = 36.76; 49.6% women) and 382 participants from Study 1b (Mage = 35.89; 51.6% women). The majority of participants identified as European or White (Study 1a: 69%; Study 1b: 69.6%)
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Participants read one of three vignettes wherein one colleague did a professional favor for another: securing a meeting with a manager, voting for the colleague's pitch, or software help. Participants also saw profiles of these two colleagues side-by-side, randomly assigned to vary by gender (man or woman) and race (Black or White). Depending on the assigned gender, profiles randomly selected names from a pool of four male or four female names, and depending on the assigned gender and race, profiles randomly selected one of twelve photos from the subset of applicable profile photos (three for each intersectional category). Profiles also randomly selected work history and hobby descriptions, for each of which there were four options.
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Next, participants reported baseline perceptions of the relative status between the two colleagues (i.e., the thanker and the helper) and perceptions of the thanker's communion before reporting expected gratitude by choosing the response the thanker should convey from a list of seven gratitude statements, arranged in increasing intensity. Then, participants received the experimental manipulation: they saw the thanker’s response either two levels above (intense gratitude condition) or below (mild gratitude condition) their personal expectation. Participants who expected response 1 or 2 (or 6 or 7) saw an even more extreme response that had not appeared in the original list of gratitude statements. Finally, participants reported post-manipulation perceptions of relative status, thanker's communion, and thanker’s competitiveness, as well as the status-related emotions participants felt toward the thanker.
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The study was approved by the University of British Columbia’s Behavioural Research Ethics Board, H18-02354.