Overview
Research shows that sincere expressions of gratitude can provide a host of benefits for both the thanker and the thanked. However, in practice, it’s easy to conflate the conventional, perfunctory “thank you” with a sincere expression of gratitude. It’s an open question whether something as simple as a customary thank you message can actually lift someone’s mood or make their day.
To test whether expressing gratitude through a simple "thank you" message can move the needle on recipients’ happiness, we designed a simple yet powerful survey experiment.
The Experiment
Our experiment was conducted with 400 participants on Amazon Mechanical Turk. Half of the participants received a thank you message at the end of a survey, while the other half received a neutral closing message. After completing the survey, participants rated their current levels of happiness on a 1-7 scale.
To set the stage for our study and mask its purpose, participants engaged in a 4-minute set of activities with a brief survey at the end. After completing the activities and survey, half of our participants were randomly assigned to a neutral condition in which we simply informed them, “This is the last survey question,” before displaying their completion code for payment.
The other half of participants were assigned to a thank you condition, where we expressed gratitude for their participation via the following message: “Thank you so much for taking this survey! We really appreciate the time and effort you put into answering these questions. This is the last survey question.”
After reading their randomly assigned message, participants were asked to rate their current happiness by answer the following question, "How happy are you right now, at this moment?" on a 1-7 scale (1 = Not at all, 7 = Very much).
Results
Our analysis revealed no significant difference in happiness ratings between the thank you condition (average = 5.46) and the control condition (average = 5.34) (p = 0.394). Moreover, we did not observe any significant interactions with gender or age.
Conclusion
Our study suggests that a simple thank you may not be enough to significantly boost others' happiness. However, this was a basic study, and a more heartfelt or involved thank you message could potentially yield a larger effect. Furthermore, our research does not explore the relationship between expressing gratitude and one's own happiness, which could be an interesting avenue for future research.
Despite the lack of a significant effect on happiness, expressing gratitude through a thank you still has positive implications. Our study indicates that saying thank you did not harm participants' moods, and may have even increased it by a trivial amount. As for us, we will continue to show our appreciation in future studies, with more heartfelt actions to back it up.
Methods Note
We used independent samples t-tests to test for significant differences in happiness between the thank you and control conditions. For statistically significant differences, the difference between the two groups' averages would be large and the corresponding "p-value" would be small (p < 0.05). To test for interaction effects, we conducted OLS regression analyses with interaction terms. The data and survey materials used for this experiment are available upon request.