Using Everyday Prayer to Test Functions of Gratitude in the Context of Religion

For the billions who practice a religion, gratitude is thought to be often expressed toward their God in prayers. We build upon two theoretical frameworks to test the effects of gratitude to God on factors central to maintaining religion: a relationship with God and incentive salience for repeating prayer. We developed a protocol to collect spoken prayers and diary data over 2 weeks (N = 93 Christians; 1,118 prayers). We present two automated text analysis methods to index gratitude in transcribed prayers: dictionary-based and GPT-4. We find that GTG is often expressed in prayers, and when people express more GTG in their prayers than their average, they report a better relationship with God and more incentive salience (positive spontaneous thoughts) about prayer. Evidence was not strong for repeating the prayer behavior. We discuss implications for the theory of gratitude and religion and methods for capturing genuine data on private behaviors like prayer.