Chloe O'Connor 

Project Description

This project is titled “The Impact of Gratitude and Gender on Cooperation”. The aim of the named project was to investigate the impact the gratitude and gender may have on cooperation. The rationale for the study is that the topic of gender and cooperation has yielded conflicting results when other methods of measurement, such as economic exchange has been used, therefore by changing the type of measurement to a survey there is potential to yield results that are more consistent with the proposed influence of stereotypical gender roles. With regards to gratitude and cooperation the change in measurement may add merit to the effectiveness of gratitude interventions in promoting cooperation as gratitude has been shown to have a positive impact in promoting gift giving and economic exchange. This study employed a quantitative online experimental design. All participants completed a survey that measured cooperation and half of those participants prior to the survey engaged in a brief 5-minute gratitude intervention. The task of the gratitude intervention was to think about someone the participants were grateful for. The data of 143 participants with the average age of 22 years, 64% of whom identified as female, was used for statistical analyses.

Project Findings

The results from the gathered data suggested that neither gender nor gratitude have an impact on cooperation. For the topic of cooperation and gratitude this result contradicts the previous findings of other research (Balconi et al., 2019; DeSteno et al., 2010; Kate & DeSteno, 2020) that found gratitude to promote cooperation . As for the topic of gender and cooperation, this result contradicts the proposed influence of stereotypical gender roles but coincides with the findings of other research on the topic (Dickens, 2017; Watkins et al.,2003), which found that gender does not have an impact on cooperation. These findings may be used as diving board into future research in both the topics of gender and cooperation and gratitude and cooperation especially in terms of further investigating the employment of a different method of measuring cooperation.