If you want to be happy, be grateful. Research shows that gratitude can indeed deliver incredible personal and professional benefits, but little has been uncovered about what makes us grateful. Until now.

USC Marshall Assistant Professor of Clinical Entrepreneurship Glenn Fox’s recently published research looks at what makes people feel gratitude, with a particular focus on our interactions with others.

“We’re telling everybody, ‘Be grateful,’ and yet there’s almost no research helping us learn how,” Fox said.

In order to understand what makes individuals feel gratitude, Fox examined several questions: When are we grateful? What kinds of things make us feel grateful? And can we put a model to it to show how gratitude works?

Gratitude, he found, deeply depends on how well an individual’s needs are met, as well as how much the individual feels seen and understood by the “gift” or gesture in question.

Examining Need Versus Effort

To conduct his research, Fox partnered with the USC Shoah Foundation, an institute that hosts the world’s largest collection of Holocaust survivor testimonies. Often, these testimonies mention a gift of some kind, Fox explained. He distilled the anecdotes into brief vignettes and presented them to college students to evaluate.

“We asked the students to put themselves in the shoes of the survivors and evaluate how much gratitude they felt for each of these gifts,” Fox said. “How much effort did it take to provide it and how much did you need it?”

Researchers found gifts could be categorized along two independent continuous variables: effort and need, and that effort and need each has their own role in inspiring gratitude.

To better understand this dynamic, take the example of a pair of hand-knitted socks. They may have taken a lot of effort to make, but perhaps the recipient lives in a warm climate and would never wear socks. This circumstance is called “high-effort, low need.” On the other hand, what if the same person was gifted a handmade sling to carry their water bottle? That would be an example of “high-effort, high need.”

Fox said no one has really looked at how “need versus effort” impacts overall gratitude. Fox said previous research analyzed when these factors match — low need-low effort or high need-high effort — but not at what happens when you manipulate them independently.

What they found was that “for every additional degree of need people felt for a gift, they were that much more grateful,” Fox said.