Floyd Simeon, Rossi Giovanni, Baranova Julija, Blythe Joe, Dingemanse Mark, Kendrick Kobin H, Zinken Jörg, Enfield N J
Department of Anthropology, Universidad San Francisco de Quito, Diego de Robles, Quito 170157, Ecuador.
Language and Cognition Department, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, Wundtlaan 1, Nijmegen 6525XD, The Netherlands.
R Soc Open Sci. 2018 May 23;5(5):180391. doi: 10.1098/rsos.180391. eCollection 2018 May.
Gratitude is argued to have evolved to motivate and maintain social reciprocity among people, and to be linked to a wide range of positive effects-social, psychological and even physical. But is socially reciprocal behaviour dependent on the expression of gratitude, for example by saying 'thank you' as in English? Current research has not included cross-cultural elements, and has tended to conflate gratitude as an emotion with gratitude as a linguistic practice, as might appear to be the case in English. Here, we ask to what extent people express gratitude in different societies by focusing on episodes of everyday life where someone seeks and obtains a good, service or support from another, comparing these episodes across eight languages from five continents. We find that expressions of gratitude in these episodes are remarkably rare, suggesting that social reciprocity in everyday life relies on tacit understandings of rights and duties surrounding mutual assistance and collaboration. At the same time, we also find minor cross-cultural variation, with slightly higher rates in Western European languages English and Italian, showing that universal tendencies of social reciprocity should not be equated with more culturally variable practices of expressing gratitude. Our study complements previous experimental and culture-specific research on gratitude with a systematic comparison of audiovisual corpora of naturally occurring social interaction from different cultures from around the world.
感恩被认为是为了促进和维持人们之间的社会互惠而演变而来的，并且与广泛的积极影响相关联——社会、心理甚至身体方面的影响。但是，社会互惠行为是否依赖于感恩的表达，比如像英语中说“谢谢”那样呢？当前的研究没有纳入跨文化元素，并且倾向于将作为一种情感的感恩与作为一种语言行为的感恩混为一谈，就像在英语中可能出现的情况那样。在这里，我们通过关注日常生活中某人从他人那里寻求并获得物品、服务或支持的事件，比较来自五大洲的八种语言中的这些事件，来探究不同社会中人们表达感恩的程度。我们发现，在这些事件中感恩的表达非常罕见，这表明日常生活中的社会互惠依赖于对围绕互助与合作的权利和义务的默契理解。同时，我们也发现了细微的跨文化差异，在西欧语言英语和意大利语中表达感恩的比例略高，这表明社会互惠的普遍倾向不应等同于更具文化差异的感恩表达行为。我们的研究通过对来自世界各地不同文化的自然发生的社会互动的视听语料库进行系统比较，对之前关于感恩的实验性研究和特定文化研究进行了补充。
