Think about the last time you felt grateful. This is likely a result of someone doing something nice for you. Feeling and expressing gratitude to others is related to good outcomes in relationships, including perhaps most of all, happiness. But what happens when one relationship partner perceives the other's gratitude towards them?
How Do People Perceiver Their Partners' Gratitude?
Before answering the question of whether perceiving a partner's gratitude benefits the relationship, it is important to understand how people perceive each other's gratitude. It turns out that these perceptions are both accurate and inaccurate. Although, intuitively, that may not seem possible, it can easily happen.
What might that look like? Imagine three couples: Rachel and Ross, Monica and Chandler, and Phoebe and Joey. If asked to rate how grateful their partner is, Rachel, Monica, and Phoebe might rate their partner's gratitude levels as 7, 8, and 9 on a 10-point scale, respectively. Now to know if they are accurate or not, and whether they are under- or overperceiving their partner's gratitude, we need to compare people's perceptions of their partner's gratitude to their partner's actual gratitude. When asked, Ross, Chandler, and Joey might report that their actual gratitude for their partners is 6, 7, and 8, respectively. In this case, all of the women underperceived their partner's gratitude by 1 point, making them somewhat inaccurate (that is, biased). However, at the same time, they were relatively accurate, because Rachel's rating of her partner was higher than Monica's or Phoebe's, and indeed, this matches the pattern of their partners' gratitude levels: Ross's actual rating of gratitude was higher than Chandler's and Joey's ratings. The main takeaway here is that people might under- or overperceive a partner's gratitude, while still being accurate about their partners' relative levels of gratitude (that is, relative accuracy).
How Accurate and Biased Are People When Perceiving Their Partner's Gratitude?
To answer this question, I worked with researchers at McGill, York University, and the University of Toronto. In two studies (514 couples altogether), we asked each member of the couple to report on how grateful they are and how grateful they think their partner is. We also asked people about how satisfied they were in their relationships. All responses were collected independently, via online surveys that were sent to each partner separately.
When comparing people's perceptions of their partner's gratitude against their partners' actual gratitude, we found that people tended to underperceive their partner's gratitude while still being relatively accurate about it.
Why Would People Underperceive Gratitude?
Of course, it is intuitive that knowing the partner's relative levels of gratitude is useful. Everybody wants to base their judgments and decisions on reality. Therefore, accuracy is useful for making important decisions. What might be less intuitive is why people may generally underperceive their partner's gratitude. In fact, research indicates that when people have to make judgments, they err on the side of caution by making the judgments that are the least costly, even though this means they are biased in a certain way. Applied to relationships, believing that the partner is a little less grateful than they actually are might avoid complacency and motivate people to continue working towards a better relationship. This contrasts with believing that their partners are more grateful than they actually are, which might lead to putting low effort in the future, and as a result, put the well-being of the relationship at risk.
Implications of Biased Gratitude Perceptions on Satisfaction
Indeed, the picture actually depended on how much a person underperceived the partner's gratitude. If they were a lot off, it was related to a less happy relationship, while underperceiving the partner's gratitude by a small amount was related to a happier relationship. Of course, if people do not believe their partners are grateful at all, while they are very actually very grateful, it could lead to relational problems. Therefore larger gaps in underestimations of partners' gratitude are not beneficial, but having a small gap seems to be healthy.
For Further Reading
Tissera, H., Visserman, M. L., Impett, E. A., Muise, A., & Lydon, J. E. (2022). Understanding the links between perceiving gratitude and romantic relationship satisfaction using an accuracy and bias framework. Social Psychological and Personality Science. https://doi.org/10.1177/19485506221137958
Visserman, M. L., Impett, E. A., Righetti, F., Muise, A., Keltner, D., & Van Lange, P. A. M. (2019). To "see" is to feel grateful? A quasi-signal detection analysis of romantic partners' sacrifices. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 10(3), 317–325. https://doi.org/10.1177/1948550618757599
Hasagani Tissera is a PhD Candidate in Psychology at McGill University. Her research largely focuses on the accuracy and bias in people's beliefs about how they are seen by others.
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