How Chinese people infer helpers' ambiguous intentions: helper effort and interpersonal relationships.

Previous researchers have tried to understand in what situations people feel gratitude and indebtedness in response to other people helping them, and have found that benefit value, helper effort, helper obligation, and helper intention were all important. However, helper intentions are not always clear. We gave Chinese participants helping vignettes and tested how they inferred helpers' ambiguous intentions. Study 1 found that helper effort significantly influenced how they infer intentions, but benefit value and helper obligation did not. Study 2 replicated the effect of helper effort and found that more effort led participants to infer that the helper was more motivated by utilitarian interests. Study 3 focused on what type of relationship the helper had with the participants, and found that closeness led participants to infer more benevolent intentions and less utilitarian intentions.