Benefit Unexpectedness and Other-Praising Study 3, 2018

245 participants from a German university were recruited via a department data base to participate in an online study examining the unexpectedness of a benefit on intended gratitude expressions towards unfamiliar targets, employing a vignette design (196 female, 46 male, 3 diverse/not applicable; Mage = 27.00, SDage = 7.26). As compensation, six participants won € 20.00 each in a lottery.
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After providing demographics, participants were asked to imagine the following situation: They had recently started to work as a student assistant at a research department. One day, while completing a task, they received very beneficial help from a gender-matched colleague. Participants were randomly assigned to the unexpectedness condition, where that colleague had never helped before and usually everyone worked alone at that department, or the expectedness condition, where that colleague had previously helped the participant. Subsequently, participants answered a manipulation check asking whether the target’s help had come unexpectedly, expectedly, or neither of those.
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Participants were then instructed to write the target an e-mail to thank him/her for helping out. These e-mails were content-coded for other-praising and self-benefiting expressions based on a coding-scheme developed by Algoe and colleagues (2016). Subsequently, participants rated eight statements (four reflecting other-praising intentions and four reflecting self-benefitting intentions) with respect to how much these reflected what they would like to express in their e-mail to the target (e.g. “You made a big contribution to this project;” “I am very happy that I was able to complete the project in time”).
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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).