Communal sharing and gratitude: how they interrelate

Individuals meet friends, neighbors, colleagues, or superiors every day. Social interactions demand the understanding of how one should think, feel, and behave in every encounter. The Relational Models Theory (Fiske, 1992) claims that, to structure and organize one’s social world, people have four mental categories of social relationships. Communal sharing is one of the categories representing relationships of closeness, based on consubstantial assimilation. Individuals eat together, share what they have, or use physical touch to feel close. Communal sharing concerns support and being attentive to needs, therefore, many situations are likely to activate gratitude. Thus, the current research focuses on the perceptions of social relationships and their influence on gratitude. First, I tested the prediction whether non-contingent benefits are a cue to communal sharing or to gratitude. Results consistently revealed that benefits increase gratitude to the extent to which one applies a communal sharing model and not equality matching or authority ranking. Therefore, non-contingent benefits directly activate communal sharing and indirectly gratitude. Second, I tested the prediction that communal sharing cues increase gratitude. Thus, a friendly touch, manipulated by a confederate, was used as a cue to induce communal sharing. The results showed that participants who received a friendly touch indicated more gratitude than those who did not. Moreover, perceiving the relationship as communal sharing mediated the link between touch and gratitude. Altogether, this research supports the representation of communal sharing by communal cues. Additionally, it broadens up the definition of gratitude as an emotion activated by communal sharing relationships.