Gratitude facilitates obedience: New evidence for the social alignment perspective.

We report four studies that tested the hypothesis that gratitude increases obedience. Four experimental studies ( = 623) found that participants who were induced to feel gratitude obeyed to a greater extent a command to grind worms in a grinder than those feeling neutral. These novel findings demonstrate that gratitude can encourage obeying instructions to exact physical harm, violating moral principles of care.