Gift Unexpectedness and Other-Praising, 2016

249 participants from the United States were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to participate in a study about a Christmas present they had just received (135 female, 114 male; Mage = 34.06, SDage = 11.07). Participants received approximately $0.35 in monetary compensation.
<br><br>
Participants named a Christmas present they had received that year for which they felt grateful and indicated who had given it to them. Then, they answered questions regarding their general feelings of surprise upon receiving this present, unexpectedness about receiving this specific present, and unexpectedness about receiving this present from the gift-giver. Subsequently, participants wrote a thank-you note to the gift-giver, which was content-coded for other-praising and self-benefiting expressions based on a coding-scheme developed by Algoe and colleagues (2016), adapted to the gift-giving context. Next, participants were asked to indicate what they would like to express to the gift-giver by rating additional items assessing other-praising (e.g. “I would like to praise him or her for making me this present”) and self-benefiting expression intentions (e.g. “I would like to express how perfectly the present suits me”). The remainder of the survey assessed additional relevant variables and demographics, such as closeness to the gift-giver, how many presents they had received from that person, happiness with the present itself, and estimated monetary value of the present.
<br><br>
There was no formal institutional ethics approval available at the time these data were collected. The research project on the relationship between unexpectedness and gratitude expressions was approved and funded by the funding institution (Center of Social and Economic Behavior at the University of Cologne).