Q: I would love to see a story on “performative gratitude,” a term for expressing gratefulness when you don’t really mean it. The usage seems to be flooding society.
A: As far as we can tell, “performative gratitude” first appeared about a dozen years ago on social media as a term for a formulaic or stock expression of thanks.
It then spread to more mainstream media, though the word “performative” had been used earlier in various similar senses.
The phrase hasn’t been recognized yet by any of the ten standard dictionaries we regularly consult or by the Oxford English Dictionary, an etymological reference with more than 900,000 entries.
The earliest example we’ve seen is from Twitter: “turn-offs: performative gratitude” (jamie@jmsnftzptrck, Feb. 15, 2014). The same author followed up with another tweet two years later: “ban performative gratitude and feigned modesty from poetry” (May 16, 2016). Several other tweeters then jumped in with comments of their own.
Soon the phrase made the leap from social media. An article on HuffPost that appeared just before the holiday season in 2016 refers to “performative gratitude” at the Thanksgiving table:
“Previous research suggests that teenagers may not benefit from performative gratitude, such as going around the table to say what you appreciate” (“Why Practicing Gratitude Matters, Even When Everything Is Awful,” by Allison Fox, Nov. 22, 2016).
And this example is from a research paper on how people use technology collaboratively:
“Posting publicly may foster performative gratitude and ego-driven motivations” (from a paper by researchers at the University of California, Santa Cruz, in CSCW ’23 Companion, a publication for an October 2023 conference in Minneapolis on CSCW, or computer-supported cooperative work).
A year later, the term showed up in The Wall Street Journal: “Performative gratitude—compelling ourselves to be grateful when we’re not—is a form of toxic positivity” (from “The Case for Being Ungrateful,” by Elizabeth Bernstein, a columnist who writes about social psychology, Nov. 24, 2024).
Finally, here’s an example from earlier this year in Psychology Today: “Performative gratitude occurs when we express thanks not out of genuine appreciation but to burnish our social image” (“Rogue Gratitude: When Thankfulness Becomes a Vice,” by the psychologist Joel Wong, April 22, 2026).
As for the etymology here, we’ll start with the much earlier “gratitude,” a noun borrowed from French in the mid-16th century and ultimately traceable to the Latin gratus (pleasing, thankful).
In the OED’s earliest example, from a Latin-English dictionary, the word is used to mean “the quality or condition of being grateful”—the sense it has today. Here’s the dictionary’s citation:
“Gratitudo, Kindnes: gratitude: thankefulnes” (Thesaurus Linguæ Romanæ & Britannicæ, 1565, by the English theologian and bishop Thomas Cooper. In the 16th century, the term “thesaurus” referred to a dictionary, encyclopedia, or the like. It didn’t come to mean a collection of synonyms until the mid-19th century).
When the adjective “performative” first appeared in the early 20th century, according to the OED, it referred to “an utterance that effects an action by being spoken or by means of which the speaker performs a particular act.” An example would be a justice of the peace saying, “I now pronounce you husband and wife.”
Oxford’s first citation for this sense is from “Memory: A Triphase Objective Action,” a study by J. R. Kantor in the Journal of Philosophy, Nov. 9, 1922.
Here we’ll cite what we consider a clearer example from the same article. In distinguishing between “informational and performative memory acts,” Kantor defines the latter as “memory acts which constitute some actual work to be done.”
Later in the century, “performative” took on what the OED describes as a “usually disparaging” sense of “speech, behaviour, etc.: done or expressed for the sake of appearance, esp. to impress others or to improve one’s own image (typically with the implication of insincere intent or superficial impact).”
The dictionary’s first citation is from The Erotics of Talk: Women’s Writing and Feminist Paradigms (1996), by Carla Kaplan: “If we are to provide more than merely performative or poetic justice we need clearer blueprints for meaningful social action.”
This disparaging sense of “performative” is how the word is used in the phrase “performative gratitude.” More neutral phrases for the same notion are “ritual politeness,” “formulaic courtesy,” “social nicety,” “conventional courtesy,” “perfunctory gratitude,” “pro-forma thanks,” and so on.
A linguist might use the term “phatic expression” to describe “thank you” and other speech used for social purposes rather than for communicating information.
The adjective “phatic” appeared in English in the early 20th century and comes from the ancient Greek φατός (phatos, “spoken”), an ancestor of “euphemism.”
The OED defines “phatic” here as describing “speech, utterances, etc., that serve to establish or maintain social relationships rather than to impart information, communicate ideas, etc.”
The dictionary notes its use in the phrase “phatic communion,” meaning “speech communication of this kind; (also) trivial or purely formal verbal contact.”
The dictionary’s first citation is from “The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages,” a contribution by the anthropologist and ethnologist Bronisław Malinowski to Meaning of Meaning (1923), a book by C. K. Ogden and A. Richards:
“There can be no doubt that we have here a new type of linguistic use—phatic communion I am tempted to call it, … a type of speech in which ties of union are created by a mere exchange of words.”