Abstract
Erik Erikson (1963) described the concept of generativity as movement away from self-interest and a desire for legacy making due to increased concerns about continuation of life following one’s death. Social generativity involves wanting to make the world a better place for future generations. In this study, we investigated whether perceptions of previous generations’ social generativity impacted social generativity through gratitude. Undergraduate students (N = 620, 73.4% female, Mage = 20.5) from a large public university in the south completed a survey that included the Gratitude Questionnaire – Six-Item Form (McCullough, Emmons, & Tsang, 2002) and the Social Generativity Scale (Morselli, & Passini, 2015), which was also modified to evaluate perceptions of previous generations’ social generativity. Gratitude partially mediated the relationship between perceptions of previous generations’ social generativity and social generativity toward future generations. Individuals who feel that previous generations struggled to build a better world for them may have a greater sense of gratitude, which in turn drives them to give back to the next generation. This finding expands on previous literature that identified gratitude as a core mechanism driving generalized reciprocity (“paying it forward”) among peers (Simpson et al., 2018) to include an intergenerational context of prosociality.