The System‐Justifying Function of Gratitude Norms
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract We propose that gratitude norms function to motivate people to express system‐justifying beliefs and attitudes. When people feel grateful for the benefits they receive from sociopolitical institutions, they may feel compelled to express their appreciation by self‐censoring any grievances they may have about the functioning of their system. We review theory and research on the psychology of gratitude and integrate it with theory and research on the system‐justification motive. We illustrate how new insights into various effects in the literature on ideology and system justification might be gained by considering how the expression of system‐justifying opinions might function as an expression of gratitude toward one's system. We speculate that this system‐justifying function of gratitude is a consequence of social norms that overgeneralize the domain of gratitude from the context of interpersonal relations between peers to the context of relations with the larger, impersonal systems that govern people's lives.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".