Benefit Unexpectedness and Other-Praising Study 2, 2017

395 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 (202 female, 193 male; Mage = 34.95, SDage = 10.81).
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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 eight items (four items reflecting other-praising expression intentions and four items reflecting self-benefitting expression intentions) asking to what degree they would like to emphasize the different aspects reflected in the items if they could talk or write to the benefactor and say "thank you". The remainder of the survey assessed additional relevant variables and demographics, such as closeness to the benefactor, relationship to the benefactor, why the benefit was unexpected or expected, how much the unexpectedness or expectedness related to the benefactor, and how much the unexpectedness or expectedness related to the benefit itself. 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).