The first cause for our suspicion that gratitude might reduce
materialism is Lerner and Keltner’s (2000, 2001) work on
affect–cognition relationships. Lerner and Keltner have shown
that emotions such as anger and fear can produce changes in
judgment and social cognition. Jackson et al. (2001) applied
Lerner and Keltner’s thinking to gratitude, demonstrating that
gratitude causes people to make stable, controllable causal attributions
regarding an individual who has enjoyed good fortune.
In other words, gratitude causes people to focus on other individuals
as causal agents, and benevolent ones at that: Recall
Dunn and Schweitzer’s (2005) finding that the experience of
grateful emotion leads people to become more trusting toward
third parties (particularly people with whom they are not well
acquainted). In this vein, we think that a specific emotion like