{"id":29293,"date":"2014-12-22T01:00:39","date_gmt":"2014-12-22T06:00:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=29293"},"modified":"2014-12-21T11:05:12","modified_gmt":"2014-12-21T16:05:12","slug":"gift-giving-explained","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2014\/12\/22\/gift-giving-explained\/","title":{"rendered":"Gift-giving, explained"},"content":{"rendered":"

Tim Harford<\/a> recounts the surprising results of several studies on the very different views of gift-givers and gift-recipients:<\/p>\n

Father Christmas might seek guidance from a set of studies conducted by Gabrielle Adams and Francis Flynn of Stanford, and Harvard\u2019s Francesca Gino.<\/p>\n

Gino and Flynn surveyed married people, asking some to reflect on wedding gifts they had received, and others to think about wedding gifts they had given. Gift givers assumed that gifts chosen spontaneously would be just as welcome as those chosen from a wedding registry. Recipients felt otherwise: they preferred the gifts that had been on the wedding list. Such lists seem charmless but they work.<\/p>\n

Gino and Flynn found similar results from a survey about birthday presents: again, givers thought that gifts they\u2019d chosen themselves were more appreciated but recipients preferred the gifts that they\u2019d specifically asked for. The lesson: you might feel that it\u2019s awkward and unnecessary to ask what gift would be welcome but the recipient of the gift sees things differently and would prefer that you asked rather than guessed.<\/p>\n

Gino and Flynn conducted a third study in which people created wish lists. Other participants were asked to choose an item on the list to be sent as a gift; a third group were asked to peruse the wish list but then to choose some other present of equivalent value. It\u2019s not surprising to discover that recipients preferred the items from their wish list \u2014 but what\u2019s remarkable is that they felt the wishlist gifts were more \u201cpersonal\u201d and \u201cthoughtful\u201d. We think that picking an item from a wish list is lazy and impersonal but the person receiving that item doesn\u2019t see it that way at all.<\/p>\n

For good measure, a fourth study by Gino and Flynn found there was one thing people appreciated even more than an item from their own wish lists: money.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s more. Adams and Flynn surveyed newly engaged couples about engagement rings. The givers assumed that more expensive rings were more appreciated. The recipients felt differently. A similar result came from asking people to think about a particular birthday present they had received or given: recipients were just as happy with inexpensive gifts, to the surprise of givers.<\/p>\n

In short, there is a vast discrepancy between how we see the world when giving gifts and when receiving them. The gift giver imagines that the ideal present is expensive and surprising; the recipient doesn\u2019t care about the money and would rather have a present they\u2019d already selected. We should spend less than we think, and we should ask more questions before we buy.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Tim Harford recounts the surprising results of several studies on the very different views of gift-givers and gift-recipients: Father Christmas might seek guidance from a set of studies conducted by Gabrielle Adams and Francis Flynn of Stanford, and Harvard\u2019s Francesca Gino. Gino and Flynn surveyed married people, asking some to reflect on wedding gifts they […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[25],"tags":[345],"class_list":["post-29293","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-christmas"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-7Ct","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29293","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29293"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29293\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":29294,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29293\/revisions\/29294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29293"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29293"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29293"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}