Gratitude and Social Media: A Pilot Experiment on the Benefits of Exposure to Others’ Grateful Interactions on Facebook

Abstract

Facebook and other social networking sites allow observation of others’ interactions that in normal, offline life would simply be undetectable (e.g., a two-voice conversation viewable on the Facebook wall, from the perspective of a real, silent witness). Drawing on this specific property, the theory of social learning, and the most direct implications of emotional contagion, our pilot experiment (N = 49) aimed to test whether the exposure to others’ grateful interactions on Facebook enhances (a) users’ felt gratitude, (b) expressed gratitude, and (c) their subjective well-being. For the threefold purpose, we created ad hoc Facebook groups in which the exposure to some accomplices’ exchange of grateful messages for 2 weeks was experimentally manipulated and users’ felt/expressed gratitude and well-being were consequently assessed. Results partially supported both hypotheses. Observing others’ exchange of grateful posts/comments on Facebook appeared to enhance participants’ in-person expression of gratitude (i.e., self-reported gratitude expression within face-to-face interactions), but not their direct and subjective experiences of gratitude. Similarly, exposure to others’ grateful messages improved some components of subjective well-being, such as satisfaction with life, but not negative and positive affect. Taken together, however, our preliminary findings suggest for the first time that social networking sites may actually amplify the spreading of gratitude and its benefits. Implications of our results for professionals and future research in the field of health, education, and social media communication are discussed.

Emotional Contagion: A Brief Overview and Future Directions

“…In a social media experiment, Wakefield and Wakefield (2018) found that when people read negative product reviews or customer experiences they tend to feel greater anxiety. Since such content is often shared, the emotional valence of the information shared via social media is affected by the emotional content observed (Ferrara and Yang, 2015;Sciara et al, 2021). These studies have confirmed that even in the complete absence of nonverbal cues, emotions can be contagious.…”

Digitalizing Gratitude and Building Trust through Technology in a Post-COVID-19 World—Report of a Case from Japan

“…Masaki et al confirmed the impact of collective gratitude on affective commitment in organizations [3]. Sciara et al confirmed that witnessing gratitude on social networking services (SNS) only partially enhances subjective well-being [4].…”

“…Recently, gratitude research has studied the social function of gratitude [1][2][3][4]. So, far, gratitude research has studied gratitude traits and emotions for individuals and the relationship among two people.…”

Affective Signals in a Social Media Recommender System

“…The Flickr LDL dataset [58], for example, contains images labeled according to a taxonomy that uses Ekman's six but also includes amusement and contentment, akin to entertained and relaxed in our current work. We also know from prior work that adequately detecting inspirational [16] and informative [28,32] content as well as content expressing gratitude [42] is beneficial for users. Craig et al [5] also found that the primary reasons adolescents use social media is because they want to be entertained, be informed, and feel connected to others.…”