Читать книгу Active Hope - Joanna Macy - Страница 35

Think of the people you trust. Do you also feel grateful toward them or suspect they feel gratitude toward you? Gratitude feeds trust, because it helps us acknowledge the times we’ve been able to count on one another. Not surprisingly, research shows we’re more likely to help those we feel grateful to, leading to a positive spiral of helping, gratitude, trust, and cooperation.⁴ Because of this, gratitude plays a key role in the evolution of cooperative behavior and societies.

When gratitude levels are high, not only are we more inclined to return favors, but we’re also more likely to assist complete strangers. In the 1970s American psychologist Alice Isen demonstrated this in an experiment in which coins were left in public phone booths so that the next person using them would get a free call.⁵ When the person had finished and was leaving the phone booth, one of the experimenters appeared to accidentally drop a file of papers just in front of the subject. This process was repeated near phone boxes that hadn’t been primed with coins. People receiving the unexpected lucky gift of a free phone call were much more likely to help the experimenter pick up her papers. This experiment, and a host of others like it, suggests that our willingness to act on behalf of others isn’t just attributable to some people being good-natured and others less so. Our readiness to help others is influenced by the level of gratitude we experience.