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Poster #181 - WEIRD Expressions of Gratitude in Children and Adolescents

Thu, March 21, 4:00 to 5:15pm, Baltimore Convention Center, Floor: Level 1, Exhibit Hall B

Integrative Statement

Psychology has a weird problem. It has become strikingly evident since the turn of the century that the research conducted in psychology overwhelmingly relies on a very narrow range of participants who reside in some quite specific areas of the world—those that are WEIRD (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic; Henrich et al., 2010). Scholars have examined the international representation of both authors and samples in leading North American and European journals in infancy (Tomlinson & Swartz, 2003), psychology (Arnett, 2008), and developmental psychology (Nielsen, et al., 2017) and found highly consistent findings: Authors were overwhelmingly based in the United States, other English-speaking countries, or Western Europe, and over 90% of the samples were from the same countries. Scholars rarely explicitly generalize from their samples to the entire world; however, as Arnett (2008) noted, they engage in implicit generalization when describing “infants,” or “adolescents,” or “families” as though their data apply to all infants, adolescents, or families.

Research on gratitude suffers largely from this same WEIRD problem. In this study we assess the extent to which data gathered in the United States is matched by data drawn from non-WEIRD societies. We therefore used the same instrument, the Wishes and Gratitude Survey (WAGS: Freitas et al., 2008, adapted from Baumgarten-Tramer, 1938) to collect data in Brazil, Russia, Turkey, China, and South Korea (i.e., a variety of non-WEIRD societies) as well as in the United States (the most-studied WEIRD society). The measure, translated and back-translated into each relevant language, simply asks respondents, “What is your greatest wish?” and, “What would you do for the person who granted you that wish?” The measure has been shown, via replication, to be a reliable means of ascertaining which of three main types of gratitude (verbal, concrete, and connective) are expressed by youth.

Participants totaled 2,537 7- to 14-year-olds, sample sizes ranging from 224 (South Korea) to 730 (United States), with mean ages ranging from 10.2 years (SD=1.86) in Turkey to 10.8 years (SD=2.13) in Brazil. Percentage of girls ranged from 51.6% (Russia) to 55.7% (China).

We used logistic regression and the United States as the reference category as we wished to assess the extent to which U.S. results were similar to those found in the non-WEIRD societies. Two findings stand out. First is that the age-related changes we found in the U.S. sample were similar to those found elsewhere. With each additional year youth were less likely to express concrete gratitude (B = -.19, eB = .828, p < .001) and more likely to express connective gratitude (B = .14, eB = 1.153, p < .001). However, youth in Russia, Turkey, China, and South Korea were two to three times less likely to express concrete gratitude (ps < .001), and almost two to four times more likely to express connective gratitude (ps < .001) than were their U.S. counterparts. More research in non-WEIRD societies is clearly needed to counteract the over-reliance on U.S. and data from other WEIRD societies.

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