Most of us know the feeling: a raise barely satisfies before we start eyeing the next one, a bigger paycheck begets a bigger wish list, and money seems to pull at our attention no matter how much of it we have. Psychologists have long wondered what might dial down that persistent craving. A new set of experiments points to a surprisingly quiet answer: gratitude.
Published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, the research tested whether feeling thankful reduces how much people want money, and if so, through what psychological route. Across four preregistered studies involving more than 3,000 participants, the answer pointed in the same direction.
The question behind the studies
Earlier work had shown that grateful people tend to be less materialistic, own fewer things, and share more readily. But those studies hadn’t pinned down whether gratitude dampens the desire for money itself, a motivation researchers treat as distinct from materialism (a values orientation) or greed (a dispositional trait). The authors wanted to test whether money desire might be the more immediate psychological target that gratitude acts on.
Agata Gasiorowska of SWPS University in Warsaw led the project with colleagues Rimple Manchanda of Sharda University in India and Maciej Koscielniak of SWPS University’s Poznan faculty. The team proposed two pathways through which gratitude might loosen money’s grip: by making people feel more connected to others, and by nudging their attention beyond narrow self-interest toward something the researchers call self-transcendence.
A cross-country starting point
The first study surveyed 905 people in the United Kingdom, Mexico, and South Africa, measuring gratitude, materialism, greed, and how important participants considered money to be. People who scored higher on gratitude placed less importance on money, and the pattern held up after accounting for materialism and greed. It also held up across all three countries, suggesting the link wasn’t limited to a single cultural setting, although the downstream connections between money desire and materialism or greed were somewhat stronger in the UK sample.
A correlation, though, can’t show which way influence runs. So the team moved to experiments.
Putting gratitude to the test
In the second study, 323 UK participants were randomly assigned to either list five things they were grateful for or list five things that had happened the previous day. Those in the gratitude group subsequently rated money as less important than those in the control condition. The effect wasn’t explained by mood shifts: even after the researchers accounted for positive and negative feelings, the gratitude effect remained. Participants in the gratitude condition also didn’t think money had changed in its economic value. What shifted was how much they cared about having it.
The third study moved from self-reports to actual money on the table. Nearly 900 US participants were told the research team had allocated 0.50 GBP to UNICEF, but that they could take any portion of it for themselves as a bonus if they felt they deserved one. Before deciding, participants were randomly assigned to one of three writing tasks: list five people or things they were grateful for (social gratitude), list five abstract things they felt grateful for such as nature or life itself (abstract gratitude), or list five nice things from the day before (control).
Both gratitude conditions led people to take less money from the charity allocation. The researchers also measured social connectedness (how close participants felt to others) and self-transcendence (a sense of meaning beyond themselves). Both forms of gratitude raised these two feelings, and those feelings were linked to taking less money. In other words, writing about gratitude appeared to boost participants’ sense of connection and meaning, and these shifts accounted for the drop in how much they kept for themselves.
For whom does gratitude work best?
The fourth study, with 1,029 US participants, tackled a different question: does this effect depend on who you are? One week before the experiment, participants filled out questionnaires about their attitudes toward money, their income, and their subjective social standing. Then they returned for what they thought was a separate study. Half wrote a gratitude letter to someone they appreciated; half wrote about what they typically do on Tuesdays.
Afterward, participants were told about a hypothetical boring, attention-demanding five-minute task and asked the minimum amount they’d want to be paid to do it. Those in the gratitude condition requested less money than those in the control.
The size of that effect, however, varied meaningfully with one personal trait: how much participants viewed money as symbolically meaningful, representing success, status, or self-worth. For people with low symbolic money beliefs, the gratitude letter had essentially no effect on their payment demand. For people with moderate beliefs, there was a clear reduction. For those who most strongly viewed money as a symbol of who they are, the gratitude effect was largest.
Income and subjective social status, by contrast, didn’t change the picture. The researchers interpret this as consistent with the idea that gratitude works by redirecting attention away from money as a marker of self-worth. People who already don’t lean on money for self-definition have less to redirect.
Caveats and what remains unknown
The effects, while consistent, were small to medium in size. All four studies were conducted online, and the authors note that in-person gratitude experiences may produce stronger reactions. The experiments also captured immediate effects; whether the dampening of money desire persists for days or weeks remains an open question.
The researchers are also cautious about the causal chain linking gratitude, money desire, materialism, and greed. Their cross-sectional data suggest money desire may sit closer to gratitude in that chain, but they acknowledge the relationships could run in multiple directions over time, with materialism and money desire reinforcing each other.
The authors also float alternative mechanisms worth testing. Gratitude might foster a sense of already having enough, reduce social comparison, or shift people’s values toward benevolence and universalism and away from achievement and power, as Shalom Schwartz’s framework of human values would predict.
Practical takeaways
For anyone running workplace wellness programs, financial coaching sessions, or personal habit experiments, the findings suggest gratitude practices may do more than lift mood. They may also soften the specific pull of money as a yardstick for self-worth, particularly for people who lean heavily on that yardstick to begin with. A brief writing exercise, whether listing five things one is thankful for or composing a letter to a specific person, produced measurable shifts in how participants valued and handled money.
The research does not suggest that wanting money is inherently harmful, and the authors note that higher income supports well-being, especially when it meets basic needs. Their focus is on money desire that goes beyond instrumental use, the kind tied to status, comparison, and self-definition. It’s that variant of wanting, they argue, that gratitude appears to quiet.
