My blog on psychology
In everyday life, we are often taught to do kind acts and help other people. Regardless of whether it’s the group gratitude activities hosted by schools, kind acts promoted by the society, or the “one good deed a day” thing that might be popular on the internet, these pro-social acts may all seems like it has become a key part of the default moral standards. Now, when that’s the case, a question that might be worth you thinking about is that...
Are kindness practices and prosocial acts that are done to benefit the society genuine gestures of empathy and compassion? Or are they just performative and transactional?
Today, I want to talk from a Psychological perspective, about the two different mechanisms behind kind acts.
First, I want to start with the opposing side. That is, why is kindness often also understood as a “transaction”? One critical evidence in psychology that is for this perspective would be a paper published on Nature, the world’s most authoritative, renowned, trusted, and oldest comprehensive scientific journal, titled “The psychological, computational, and neural foundations of indebtedness.”, published in January 2nd, 2024. This paper proposed a conceptual model of indebtedness, to model one's reaction after receiving help. When you feel that that is the case, the kindness you give back and the gratitude you pay, will no longer be a genuine emotion, but instead of an altruistic reason, a reciprocity to balance the social accounts. In other words, helping others create an “emotional debt”, and expressing gratitude and kindness back, is the way to pay back the debt, strongly suggesting the point of “transactional kindness”
This point is especially visible in gratitude programs or activities that ask you to express gratitude via activities, for example for school. In this case, we are explicitly told “how to express gratitude”, or “what kind of gratitude is enough” When we don’t fulfill these societal expectations, we will be seen as cold, detached, rude, or even morally wrong. In this case, gratitude acts turn from an internal experience, into an act to be seen as morally correct.
However, if we only stay on the explanation of “kindness debt”, we will be overlooking another equally important evidence, that disagrees with the fact that kindness practices or prosocial acts are performative and transactional, but instead are genuine gestures of empathy and compassion. Of which would be the paper published in April 2006 on Psychology Science by Bartlett, M. Y., and DeSteno, D.. This study showed that gratitude can act as an incidental emotion that encourages helping even when there is no expectation of social reward. They discovered that people who were made to feel thankful were more inclined to assist strangers at their own expense, indicating that pro-social acts also result from internal emotional states, rather than calculated reciprocity. This effect is even more highlighted in the Study 3 of this published paper, how this incidental effect dissipates as soon as one is made aware of the true cause of the emotional state. This is a very strong evidence that calculations were not a part of the prosocial acts caused by gratitude, using a highly standardized, quantified test, showing that prosocial acts may not be carefully calculated. This paper lends credence to the idea that prosocial actions, at least in some cases, are more than just calculated social performances.
Therefore, on the problem of “structured gratitude”, the key is not whether the emotion of gratitude is real or not, but instead on whether the gratitude is overstructurized, externalized, and standardized. When gratitude is still an internal unassessed emotion, it can naturally push for pro-social acts, but as soon as it turns into a task, target, or a societal expectation, it can very easily slide onto the transactional side. In this case, people no longer “feel gratefulness”, but “complete gratefulness” like a task.
In conclusion, kindness isn’t black or white, and for which psychology tells us that psychology is sometimes emotion-driven, unconscious, and non-calculating, but sometimes norm-driven, social, and transactional.
Perhaps the closest we come to the purest kind acts and gratefulness occurs precisely when there are no rating standards, no social expectations, and no one demands that we say “thank you”.
References
Bartlett, M. Y., & DeSteno, D. (2006). Gratitude and prosocial behavior: helping when it costs you. Psychological science, 17(4), 319–325. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2006.01705.x
Gao, X., Jolly, E., Yu, H. et al. The psychological, computational, and neural foundations of indebtedness. Nat Commun 15, 68 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-44286-9
Published on 2nd of February, 2026 at 11:19:37 Singapore Standard Time
Filed under Psychology Blog