The roles of obligation and gratitude in explaining the effect of favors on compliance

Several studies suggest that providing a favor to a target before making a direct request for compliance is more effective than making a direct request alone. The most widely accepted explanation for this effect is that receiving favors causes beneficiaries to feel obligated to repay. Another potential explanation is that beneficiaries comply out of gratitude to the benefactor. Past conceptualizations frequently confound obligation and gratitude and no research tests these alternative explanations. We advance the study of reciprocal behavior by making conceptual distinctions between obligation and gratitude, and testing these two presumed mediating states in two experiments. Results demonstrate that obligation and gratitude can be empirically distinguished, supporting the gratitude explanation, but not the obligation explanation.