About

What was the Gratitude Tree?

Gratitude logo

The pandemic brought about unprecedented hardship for millions of people, but many also found reasons to be thankful or grateful for help, support, or kindness.


After seeing expressions of thanks and gratitude on social and mainstream media during the pandemic, we realized that there was no central space dedicated to these expressions.

The Gratitude Tree helped people to express, share, and find kindness and gratitude related to Covid-19.

Why use the Gratitude Tree?

  • Posting a leaf of thanks made people feel good.
  • Psychological research showed that feeling grateful was good for one’s well-being and health. In a review of gratitude research, Schache and colleagues (2018) concluded that gratitude was associated with psychological well-being in healthy people. In other research, gratitude was associated with greater quality of life and improved health in people with chronic health conditions.
  • Seeing what other people had written could make one feel good.
  • Psychological research showed that even engaging with positive online content could develop positive emotions.
  • Those who had shown kindness or altruism could see that kindness and altruism were good for them as well.

In a meta-analysis (which included a total of 4,045 participants), kindness was shown to be good for the well-being of the person who was kind, and similar effects were found in people who were altruistic.

Who created the Gratitude Tree?

The Gratitude Tree was created by the Citizen Forensics research project team, based at The Open University, Lancaster University, The University of Exeter, and Lero (The Irish Software Centre). The team brings together expertise in Computing, Social Psychology, and Forensic Cognition.

How could people get involved in Gratitude Tree research?

The Citizen Forensics research group often ran experiments in which participants could participate by clicking a link. They were also involved in other research which could be accessed through other links.

Analysis of the use of The Gratitude Tree highlighted six different types of tree being created, which included personal gratitude journalling, work-place gratitude sharing, study group gratitude sharing, and event-triggered gratitude expressions. For more information, see our CHI 2024 Late Breaking Work paper:

Zhang, Min et al., (2024). How Do People Use a Public Gratitude Platform in the Wild? In: Extended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA ’24), 11-16 May 2024, Honolulu, Hawaii. Link: https://oro.open.ac.uk/96461/

Partners

The Open University
Lancaster University
Centre for Policing Research and Learning
EPSRC- Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council
Lero – The Irish Software Research Centre