List Length, List Content, and Gratitude List Intervention Outcomes

Abstract

Gratitude lists, well-being interventions in which participants list things that they are grateful for, have recently grown in popularity. However, being tasked with generating longer gratitude lists might backfire and be associated with less felt gratitude. Furthermore, the content of these gratitude lists is rarely examined. In three studies of 3,936 participants, people assigned to shorter length conditions (three items) were relatively comparable in gratitude and life satisfaction to those assigned to longer list conditions (six and 12 items), although an exploratory analysis revealed that failure to list enough gratitude items for a given condition was associated with lower well-being. These results provided evidence that ease-of-retrieval effects may not play a strong role in the efficacy of gratitude lists. Those who listed particular content items (e.g., close relationships and health) were higher in post-intervention gratitude and well-being than those who did not.