A Grateful Mind Is Very Beautiful

In 2003 the psychologists Robert Emmons and Michael McCullough asked three groups of students to write a short note each week. One group listed things they were grateful for, another listed irritations, and a third listed neutral events. After ten weeks the grateful group felt better about their lives, were more optimistic about the coming week, and reported fewer physical complaints and more time spent exercising. The study was small and its findings have been debated, but it gave a measurable form to an old claim, that gratitude changes the person who feels it.

Ancient traditions had reached the same view without data. Cicero called gratitude not only the greatest of the virtues but the parent of all the others. In Sanskrit the word is kritajna, one who knows what has been done for him, and its opposite, kritaghna, one who forgets it, is among the gravest charges in Indian ethical writing. In the epic tradition, Rama's tender admission that he can never repay Hanuman's service is read as a mark of his greatness. The Gita goes further and calls a thief the person who enjoys what nature gives without offering anything in return.

The topic says that a grateful mind is beautiful, and not merely healthy or useful, and the choice of word deserves attention. Beauty is the quality we attribute to things that show order, proportion and generosity without apparent effort. The grateful mind shows these. It notices what has been given by parents, teachers, strangers and chance, and in noticing it corrects the proud account in which a person is only the author of his own success. Such a mind is hospitable to others because it remembers that it was once hosted.

Psychology offers a mechanism. People adapt quickly to improvements in their circumstances, a tendency that Philip Brickman and Donald Campbell called the hedonic treadmill in 1971. A raise, a new house or a promotion delights for a while and then becomes the new baseline. Gratitude interrupts the adaptation by returning attention to the baseline and asking what it would be like to lose it. The grateful person is not deceived about the world. He simply holds the good in view for longer.

He simply holds the good in view for longer.

Gratitude also holds societies together. A community in which help is acknowledged is one in which people keep helping, since thanks is the cheapest form of payment and the one that cannot be inflated. The Indian habit of touching the feet of elders, the acknowledgement of supervisors in every doctoral thesis and the langar that feeds strangers without asking for anything in return each carry a memory that no one prospers alone. A citizen who feels thankful toward the soldier, the farmer and the sanitation worker is also more likely, one may reasonably expect, to support policies that protect them.

Education systems have begun to take notice. The Delhi government introduced a happiness curriculum in 2018 for children from nursery to the eighth class, with daily mindfulness and reflection activities, and programmes in several other countries include gratitude exercises. Whether a habit taught in a classroom becomes a disposition in an adult is not yet known. The attempt rests on a sound assumption, however, which is that a mind can be trained to attend to what it has as well as to what it lacks, and that the training is more likely to work when children see the adults around them practising it.

Yet gratitude has a dark side. The poor and the powerless have often been told to be grateful, and the demand has been used to silence complaint. The story of Ekalavya shows the danger. Drona, who had refused to teach him, demanded his thumb as a teacher's fee, and the boy gave it, thankful and ruined. A culture that praises gratitude can make protest look like ingratitude, and a worker told to be thankful for a job may stay silent about its wages. The criticism is sound as far as it goes. But it describes gratitude that is demanded, and demanded gratitude is no longer the mind that the topic praises. The gratitude of a free mind is offered and not extracted, and it sits easily beside the capacity to ask for better. A person may be thankful for a school and still insist that it be improved.

The line between the two is not always easy to draw. Feelings of thanks that arise from wisdom and from submission can feel identical from inside, and a person may not know which one he is having. A useful test is what the grateful person does next. If thanks leads him to give back, to notice others and to work for a fairer arrangement, it is the beautiful kind. If it leads only to silence, it has been captured. The same test applies to institutions, which can encourage gratitude by being worthy of it or demand it by being unwilling to change.

There is also a question about direction. A reader of the Emmons study might ask whether gratitude made the students happier or whether happier students were simply better at feeling grateful. The experiment assigned the task at random, which supports the first answer, but the effect was modest and it faded in some replications. Everyday experience points both ways. Anyone who has been ill, poor or afraid knows how hard it is to count blessings, and anyone who has been comfortable knows how easily they go uncounted. The question matters for policy as well as for philosophy, since a society that wants a thankful citizenry could be tempted to buy it with slogans and not earn it with services.

Beauty in a mind, like beauty in a face, may be partly a gift and partly a habit. The traditions that taught gratitude as a discipline assumed that it could be learned, and the research suggests that small, regular practice has real if modest effects. It remains unclear whether gratitude makes people good or whether only the good are able to feel it, and the experiments, which measure what people say they feel and not what they are, cannot yet tell the difference.