Science Reveals the Secret to Giving the Perfect Gift
Remember that time you decided to go off-registry and get your friend something unique for her wedding shower? Or the time you had that clever idea of getting your sibling a surprise for Christmas — even though he not-so-subtly sent you a link to his Amazon wish list? Though your heart was in the right place, odds are your approach was totally off the mark, according to new research from Current Directions in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science.
It turns out that gift givers and gift recipients are on totally different pages. The crux of the miscommunication is that most gift givers focus on watching a loved one’s eyes widen at the moment of the exchange, which is sweet — except it goes against the recipient’s expectations. According to a press release about the report, people receiving gifts “are more focused on the long-term utility or practical attributes of the gift.” In other words, that nutcracker snow globe is cute and all, but your mom would rather get that Vitamix she’s been coveting — and just watch The Nutcracker on TV instead.
According to the study, common gifting mistakes include going rogue even when your recipient creates a wish list or a registry (as mentioned above), focusing on tangible items as gifts instead of offering experience-based gifts like a weekend getaway or a cooking class (which results in more long-term enjoyment), and, sadly, offering charitable donations in your recipient’s name, “which seem special at the moment of gift exchange but provide almost no value to recipients down the road.” So much for philanthropy!
Jeff Galak of Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business led the study and had this to say about his strategy: “We studied many existing frameworks from research in this area, trying to find a common ground between them. What we found was that the giver wants to ‘wow’ the recipient and give a gift that can be enjoyed immediately, in the moment, while the recipient is more interested in a gift that provides value over time. We are seeing a mismatch between the thought processes and motivations of gift givers and recipients. Put another way, there may be times when the vacuum cleaner, a gift that is unlikely to wow most recipients when they open it on Christmas day, really ought to be at the top of the shopping list, as it will be well used and liked for a long time.”
But you can be a better Santa, and the solution isn’t much of a secret. Be more pragmatic in your choice of gift, and empathize with your recipient: what will she really make use of? Take yourself out of the equation, the study suggests, and truly give selflessly. Galak acknowledges that many people exchange gifts to strengthen the relationship between giver and recipient, but that we don’t often consider the practical, long-term use of what we’re giving. We just want to make our loved ones smile.
“By considering how valuable gifts might be over the course of the recipient’s ownership of them, rather than how much of a smile it might put on recipients’ faces when they are opened, we can meet these goals and provide useful, well-received gifts,” Galak suggests.
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