Worried about buying the perfect holiday gift? Overthinking it won’t help

December 17, 2014 by admin
Filed under Choosing Lingerie

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There’s a certain kind of person – maybe you know one, maybe you are one – who takes great pride in being an incredibly thoughtful giver of holiday gifts. To unwrap a present from such a person is to be forcibly confronted with the sheer quantity of effort and time he or she has invested in finding something perfectly right for you. Which can be lovely, of course, but also (I can be honest among friends, right?) pretty annoying – especially if your own holiday shopping consisted of grabbing a fistful of iTunes gift cards on Christmas Eve.

This article isn’t for those ultra-considerate gift-givers, who in any case probably finished all their shopping by late November. It’s for the rest of us – and, true to the spirit of the season, it’s good news. Being extremely thoughtful about your gift-giving, it seems, could be tremendously detrimental when it comes to choosing presents that the recipients will actually enjoy.

Last year, University of Cincinnati researcher Mary Steffel got some pre-Christmas publicity for a study identifying a hazard she called “over-individuation”: the more we try to tailor a present precisely to a recipient, she and her co-author Robyn LeBeouf concluded, the more we’re at risk of choosing something that person might hate. In one clever part of their research, participants were told about two fictional women, and given lists of their favourite movies; they were then asked to pick from a selection of DVDs as potential presents. When participants had to choose a gift for only one woman, they wisely picked a DVD in the genre she liked the most. But when asked to pick a gift for both women, participants started focusing on the differences between the two women’s tastes, even if that meant choosing a film much less likely to please its recipient. (Obviously, this is all a bit out of date: give me any DVD at all, these days, and my heart sinks a little at the logistics required to watch it.)

The bluntest interpretation of Steffel and LeBeouf’s findings is that, faced with the job of buying gifts for multiple people, we focus more on thinking of ourselves as good givers – carefully arriving at a unique selection for each recipient – than on giving people what they actually want.

I’d draw the same conclusion from Steffel’s latest work on that much-scorned symbol of lazy giving: the gift card. Givers, she reports, prefer to gift more specific cards – like a voucher to spend at that one independent boutique that you just know your friend absolutely loves – while recipients prefer cards they can spend on almost anything. Once again, givers seem to be focused mainly on feeling like accomplished givers than actually giving people what they want. The solution, Steffel argues, is “to focus on what recipients would like, rather than on what they are like.” (Emphasis mine.)

There’s a long tradition of academics scolding us for doing gift-giving wrong – the most famous of which is probably economist Joel Waldfogel’s tongue-in-cheek 1993 paper The Deadweight Loss of Christmas, which compared how much people spent on Christmas presents with how much the recipients would have paid, with their own money, for those gifts. Gifts, he concluded bleakly, are worth somewhere between 10% and a third less, on average, to the people who get them than the people who give them. To the archetypal coldly rational economist, that’s like ripping up or burning money: a senseless waste. Far better to give cash, he proposed, which is the only gift that you can be certain both parties will feel is worth exactly the same.

Tongue-in-cheek or not, though, it’s possible that these scholars miss the point: they’re focused exclusively on the utility of the present itself to the recipient. But the real point of holiday gift-giving, surely, is the symbolic value of the exchange. From this perspective, it doesn’t much matter if the perfectly appropriate gift you spent hours selecting for your mother or husband ends up giving them pleasure. What matters is that you’re demonstrating your feelings for them – something that, with luck, gives them a different and perhaps higher form of pleasure, even if the sweater or the DVD or the cheesemaking kit itself goes unused.

Yet even so, findings such as Steffel and LeBoeuf’s suggest that we may have to make a trade-off – deciding, in the case of each gift, whether we’re going to try to maximize its value as a symbol of our relationship to the recipient, or to maximize the pleasure that the gift itself could deliver. I plan to weigh both options carefully, giving plenty of time and consideration to the dilemma as it applies to each of the people on my list … when I get around to my own Christmas shopping, at 3:30pm or thereabouts on December 23rd.