ABSTRACT

Past research has established that gratitude, a sense of appreciation for the benefits one has received, is a moral emotion that motivates reciprocity. How does gratitude influence moral evaluations generally? The current paper provides a novel investigation of the relationships between trait gratitude and moral outrage, an index of concern over specific moral violations. In two studies, we found that more grateful individuals expressed greater moral concern about domains in which harms were perpetrated against people, but not harm violations against animals or more trivial moral violations. In Study 2, we explore whether gratitude-based differences in moral concern might be explained by trait empathy or differences in commitment to specific moral foundations and find that empathy, specifically, largely accounts for gratitude’s role in moral concern. This research expands understanding of gratitude’s role in moral psychology and speaks to gratitude’s importance in moral judgment.

摘要

过去的研究表明，感恩，一种对自己所获得的好处的感激之情，是一种激励互惠的道德情感。感恩一般如何影响道德评价？目前的论文对特质感恩与道德愤怒之间的关系进行了一项新颖的调查，道德愤怒是对特定道德侵犯的关注指数。在两项研究中，我们发现更多感恩的人对伤害人类的领域表达了更大的道德关注，但不会伤害侵犯动物或更琐碎的道德侵犯。在研究 2 中，我们探讨了基于感恩的道德关注差异是否可以通过特质移情或对特定道德基础的承诺差异来解释，并发现移情，特别是，在很大程度上解释了感恩在道德关注中的作用。这项研究扩展了对感恩在道德心理学中的作用的理解，并说明了感恩在道德判断中的重要性。