Project Overview
According to a 2022 survey by the market research company Ipsos averaging across 30 countries, 1 in 3 adults do not consider themselves to be happy. People may not always know what steps to take to implement a positive and lasting change on their mood. One action-based step that can be taken to improve happiness is gratitude, and when implemented as a habit, the practice of gratitude can make a significant, long-lasting life change.
With this project, I conducted primary and secondary research on habit formation and gratitude practices with the objective of producing a detailed research book detailing how and why to develop a gratitude habit in order to promote happiness and well-being.
Beneficiaries
Primary beneficiaries of this research would be designers creating a product to help people form better habits to improve their happiness. This research provides useful context and information necessary to develop that product.
Beneficiaries of this research would also include people wanting information on forming a gratitude habit, either directly, as it will provide detailed and actionable information to form that habit, or indirectly through being a user of a product designed using this research. These target users would be adults or teens who are unsatisfied with their day-to-day well-being and need help knowing how and what changes to make.
Research Goals
Determine how habits are formed and how they can be harnessed for positive life change.
Understand the benefits of gratitude and its impact on happiness and well-being.
Explore how people practice gratitude and how it affects their lives.
Determine the effects of practicing gratitude short-term on well-being and life satisfaction.
Compare people with no gratitude habits to people with long-term gratitude habits.
Process
Literature Review
My findings from the literature review were compiled to be included in the final research book and are summarized in this infographic:
Key Insight 1: Implementing activities as habits provides an opportunity to make a lasting lifestyle change.
Key Insight 2: The success of habit formation can be dependent on the implementation of various techniques, such as setting a short-term goal, formulating a cue-based plan, incorporating immediate rewards, integrating flexibility, and harnessing social support.
Key Insight 3: The benefits of gratitude can be maximized when practiced habitually.
Survey
A selection of survey questions and results that provide insight into how and why participants practice gratitude is as follows:
From the survey data, I created three personas to guide the design process.
Key Insight 4: Gratitude practices commonly take the form of a small activity that can be built into an existing routine.
Key Insight 5: People often practice gratitude in more than one way.
Key Insight 6: Gratitude tends to be practiced with the intention to increase positive emotions and improve mental health.
Case Study
Each participant received a sheet that included information about the case study and the overall project on one side, while the reverse featured a worksheet to guide them through the case study.
The pre- and post-surveys given before and after the five days of gratitude interventions measured well-being, using questions adapted from Emmons and McCullough. This same measure was also included in the survey of those with existing habits. It asked participants about their affect state by having them rate how often over the past five days they have experienced a selection of emotions, and it asked about participants’ global life appraisal by having them express how satisfied they feel about their life and how optimistic they feel about the upcoming week.
Key Insight 7: Gratitude interventions seem to have a greater effect in terms of increasing positive emotions, especially gratefulness, thankfulness, enthusiasm, and calmness, than decreasing negative emotions or influencing global life appraisal.
Analysis
I compared the data collected from both the survey and the case study to understand how measures of well-being differed between those with no gratitude habit (data from before the case study gratitude interventions), those with a short-term gratitude habit (data from after the case study gratitude interventions), and those with a long-term gratitude habit (data from survey respondents who said they practiced gratitude every day or multiple days a week).
While limitations such as a small sample size, a non-experimental case study, sampling bias, and the observer-expectancy effect may have some impact on the results, the data shows that short term gratitude practices have a stronger initial impact on well-being. Those with long-term gratitude habits scored higher, though not as high as participants immediately following gratitude interventions, on the well-being measure, suggesting a more stable and longer-lasting effect. The effects found on overall life satisfaction was not significant.
Key Insight 8: Short-term gratitude interventions seem to have a stronger, immediate impact on well-being, while gratitude habits have a longer-lasting impact on well-being.
Conclusion
Because habits make up so much of behavior, harnessing the power of cue-dependent actions can lead to lasting lifestyle change. Habit formation and maintenance can be mediated through techniques such as setting a short-term goal, formulating a cue-based plan, incorporating fun and immediate rewards, integrating flexibility, and harnessing social support. Combining gratitude interventions with habit formation will allow gratitude's well-being and prosociality benefits to be maintained and longer-lasting.