Benefit Unexpectedness and Other-Praising Study 1, 2017

299 participants from the United States were recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to participate in a study about the unexpectedness of a recalled benefit on intended gratitude expressions (151 female, 146 male, 2 other; Mage = 35.91, SDage = 11.39).
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Participants were randomly assigned to recall an unexpected or expected benefit they had received from another person for which they were grateful and briefly described why they were "very" or "not at all" surprised, respectively. Participants then saw six items in a fixed random order asking what they would like to express to the person responsible for the described benefit. Three items assessed other-praising (e.g., “I would like to express what the sacrifice in terms of money or time s/he invested mean to me”), and three items assessed self-benefiting expression intentions (e.g., “I would like to express how perfectly the benefit suits me or came in handy in this situation”). Then, participants answered two manipulation-check items about the incident that formed an index of unexpectedness (e.g., “How surprised were you about it?"). Participants received approximately $0.35 in monetary compensation.
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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).