Overview
What It Is
A stand-alone button, or reaction, which enables users to express thanks and gratitude.
When To Use It
This works as either a react icon for when users may 'like' content, or as a stand-alone button beneath content.
What Is Its Intended Impact
Evidence has shown that receiving thanks increased two-week retention of Wikipedia contributors by 2 percentage points on average, and caused people to send more thanks to others by 43% on average.
How We Know It Works
Why It Might Work
In 2020, Cornell's Citizen & Technology Lab—i.e. CAT Lab—published findings from a year-long experiment. The study explored the impacts of 344 volunteers thanking 2,702 Arabic, German, Polish, and Persian-language, Wikipedia contributors.
Why It Matters
The ability to increase new user retention by two percent, coupled with a 43% in thankful exchanges, could correlate to not only increased sustained web traffic, but also to a more resilient community.
We also think that it matters that people, when they are thanked via a button like this, proceed to use the button to thank others.
Humans are social creatures. Research on gratitude has found that, when your brain recognizes that someone has done something nice for you, it reacts with gratitude to motivate you to repay them and others. Gratitude signals the "interpersonal warmth of the expresser, [which prompts] investment in the burgeoning social bond." (Williams, L. A., & Bartlett, M. Y., 2015)
We would like to see more research on whether this increased gratitude has more direct, measurable effects on community cohesiveness and resilience to anti-social behavior.
Special Considerations
Examples
Our Confidence Rating
Likely
Likely Grades are for interventions with preprinted evidence. Preprints are academic manuscripts awaiting formal peer review.
in the wild
This intervention has precedence, and exists, or has at one time or another, existed in the wild.
Citations
Volunteers Thanked Thousands of Wikipedia Editors to Learn the Effects of Receiving Thanks
Author(s)
J. Nathan Matias, Reem Al-Kashif, Julia Kamin, Max Klein and Eric Pennington
Date of Publication
June 20, 2020
Sample Size(s) (N-values)
Affiliate(s)
Citizen and Technology (CAT) Lab
Entry Type
Research Article or Manuscript
Publication Status
Study Design
Online Impact
Citations
APA Citation
2702
There's more to learn about this intervention. Want to help?
Do you think this intervention could have more benefits, unacknowledged drawbacks, or other inaccuracies that we've neglected to mention here?
We always welcome more evidence and rigorous research to back up, debunk, or augment what we know.
If you want to be a part of that effort, we'd love to have your help!
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