The thank-you letter you keep putting off is worth writing

Think of someone who changed your life a little: a teacher, a coach, the neighbor who drove you to the hospital, the manager who took a chance on you. Have you ever told them, in detail, what they did? Most of us haven't. Research on one of the simplest exercises in psychology, the gratitude letter, suggests we hold back for the wrong reasons.

The gratitude visit

The idea got a boost in 2005, when the psychologist Martin Seligman and colleagues tested several happiness exercises in a randomized, placebo-controlled online study, published in American Psychologist. One asked people to write a letter of thanks to someone they had never properly thanked, then deliver it. According to the Greater Good Science Center's summary of the evidence, of the five exercises tested, "writing and delivering a Gratitude Letter showed the greatest benefit to people's happiness one month later."

It didn't last forever. Six months on, Greater Good notes, "their happiness had dropped back down to where it was before," which is why some researchers suggest repeating the exercise "once every six weeks or so." The original participants were "largely white, middle-aged adults with college degrees," and later cross-cultural work suggests the benefits may be smaller in some cultures. In one study, South Koreans got less of a lift from the exercise than Americans, and Indian adults reported feeling more guilty and indebted afterward. So it's a good practice, not a cure-all.

We misjudge the reader

In 2018 Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley looked at the other side of the envelope: the person who gets the letter. In experiments published in Psychological Science, they asked people to write a gratitude letter to someone who had touched their life, then predict how surprised, happy and awkward the recipient would feel. Then they asked the recipients.

The writers were too pessimistic on every count. As the researchers put it, quoted by the University of Chicago, "Expressers significantly underestimated how surprised recipients would be about why expressers were grateful, overestimated how awkward recipients would feel, and underestimated how positive recipients would feel." Epley summed it up for Chicago Booth Review: "Expressers recognized that their recipient would feel good, but recipients still felt even better than the expressers expected."

Two things tend to hold writers back. One familiar excuse, as the UChicago summary notes, is assuming the other person already knows you're grateful, which is exactly why the surprise gets underestimated. The other is worrying about saying it well. The recipients didn't care about polish: they were moved, as the UChicago summary puts it, "simply by the warmth of the gesture." "It suggests that thoughts about how competently people can express their gratitude may be a barrier to expressing gratitude more often in everyday life," Kumar said. The Association for Psychological Science notes that recipients reported "even more surprise and delight than what the senders expected."

That fits a broader pattern in how people misjudge kindness, which our science of giving guide covers along with the findings that have held up and the ones that haven't.

Today's act

Want to bring the habit to your team? Our guide to generosity at work has ideas for making thanks part of the week.

Sources

1. Seligman, M.E.P., Steen, T.A., Park, N. & Peterson, C. — Positive psychology progress: Empirical validation of interventions, American Psychologist 60(5):410–421 (2005)
2. Greater Good in Action, UC Berkeley — Gratitude Letter
3. University of Chicago News — People underestimate value of sending letters of appreciation (Sept. 5, 2018)
4. Chicago Booth Review — Why we underestimate the power of expressing gratitude (Dec. 2018)
5. Association for Psychological Science — People Underestimate the Power of Saying 'Thanks' (2018)