We value delayed pleasure or gain more if we experience the emotion of gratitude at the time of making the decision. This effect can be used to strengthen willpower in the fight against any addiction, such as shopaholism.
We always prefer to get pleasure or benefit right now, and not in the future – this is one of the fundamental laws of human behavior. The only question is how much the expected benefit in the future should exceed the immediate one in order to choose it after all, and what affects our estimates.
Thanks to research* by psychologist David DeSteno of Northeastern University (Boston) and his colleagues at Harvard and UC Riverside (USA), we now know a little more about this. The June issue of the journal Psychological Science published a report on their experiment. Participants were divided into three groups and in each they were offered the choice of taking $54 immediately or $80 a month later.
At the same time, in one group, people were “informed” of the emotion of happiness, tuning them in the appropriate way, in the other – the emotion of gratitude, and the third was left as a control and did not evoke any feelings in the participants who fell into it.
To endure and get $80, but in a month, and not 54, but now, agreed those whom the researchers brought into a grateful mood, and in the control group and even in the group saturated with happiness, the participants still preferred the present to the future. Previously, the authors of the work note, it has already been established that a feeling of sadness, on the contrary, weakens willpower and provokes impatience in financial matters.
Read more:
- Shopping therapy
Destino’s experiment prompted another American psychologist, Professor Kit Yarrow of San Francisco’s Golden Gate University, to think about how to use the knowledge gained in the fight against shopaholism. Yarrow’s own research indicates that when people make sudden over-purchases, they are either trying to make up for the feeling of boredom and emptiness in their lives, or they are distracted and not fully focused on what they are doing. Yarrow proposes to counter both of these reasons with the emotion of gratitude.
Every time you experience pleasant experiences, be it a friendly meeting or a gentle breeze, a delicious dinner or admiring the beauties of nature, you should thank fate for this joy, and not to avert your eyes, but sincerely and thoughtfully, concentrating on your feelings. Then the feeling of life will become fuller, and the impulse to fill the emptiness inside with something will not be so strong. By the way, shopping may well be among the joys worthy of gratitude: gratitude for the acquired good thing will help to refrain from further, already unnecessary purchases.
* David DeSteno et al. «Gratitude ‒ A Tool for Reducing Economic Impatience», Psychological Science, June 2014.