The Effect of Simulating the Absence of Benefits on Gratitude: Prior Expectations and Posterior Counterfactual Thinking1,2,3

Abstract

Beneficiaries can have prior expectations of not receiving benefits and imagine ex-post that benefits were not given. The present study examined the preregistered hypothesis that these two kinds of absence simulations increase gratitude. Both Studies 1 and 2 were conducted in a Japanese university. In Study 1, reading a manipulated vignette made participants in the absence simulation condition expect not to receive a benefit, while those in the control condition were made to expect to receive it. In Study 2, after reading a benefit-receiving vignette, those in the absence simulation condition imagined the situation where they did not receive it, while those in the control condition again imagined receiving it. In both studies, all the participants rated their gratitude for certain fixed benefits in each vignette. Results showed that gratitude in neither of the two absence simulation conditions was higher than that of the respective control conditions, suggesting that simulating the absence of benefits does not increase gratitude.