With the holidays fast approaching, many of us are hunting for that special something for the special someones in our lives. It’s how we show we care about them. So why is it so hard to find the right gift? This week, we revisit a favorite 2022 conversation with researcher Jeff Galak. We'll discuss why the presents we give for holidays and birthdays often miss their mark, and how to become a better gift-giver. Looking for a holiday gift for a fellow Hidden Brain fan? You can now give a gift subscription to Hidden Brain+! Or if material gifts are more your style, go to shop.hiddenbrain.org to find Hidden Brain t-shirts, mugs, stickers and more.
Chapter 1: What is the main theme of gift-giving?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. In The Gift of the Magi, a short story written by O. Henry and published in 1905, a young husband and wife each struggle privately with a dilemma. Christmas is coming, and neither has enough money to buy the other a gift. Della has only $1.87 saved up. Jim has almost nothing. You probably know how the story turns out.
Della sells her beautiful long hair in order to buy Jim a fine chain for his watch, the most valuable thing he owns. Meanwhile, Jim sells his watch to pay for a set of expensive combs for Della's hair. Each gift negates the other. At the end of the story, O. Henry writes, the Magi, as you know, were wise men, wonderfully wise men, who brought gifts to the babe in the manger.
They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house.
But in a last word to the wise of these days, let it be said that of all who give gifts, these two were the wisest. Of all who give and receive gifts, such as they are the wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the magi. In other words, it's the thought that counts. That's a sweet idea, but is it true? Today on the show, modern psychology takes on an ancient problem.
Chapter 2: Why do we struggle with gift-giving?
Gifts and gift-giving are as old as humanity itself. Over the centuries, humans have used gifts to express love, offer admiration, and obtain favors. New research identifies why the presents we offer for birthdays and holidays often miss their mark. How to Become a Better Gift Giver, this week on Hidden Brain.
All of us know what it's like to get a great gift, the kind we receive with pleasure and that we remember for a long, long time afterwards. All of us also remember, well, the other kind of gift, the board game that doesn't interest us, the dashed-off last-minute bauble, the inappropriate item of clothing.
Chapter 3: What are the common pitfalls in gift-giving?
At Carnegie Mellon University, Jeff Gallach has spent a lot of time thinking about gifts and gift-giving. He has learned a lot about bad gifts. Jeff Gallach, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you for having me. Jeff, I understand that growing up as an American with Jewish-Ukrainian roots, your family put on a big celebration on New Year's Day every year.
Can you tell me what that gathering was like when you were a small child?
So we had this tradition where our immediate family, as well as some close friends, would all gather. And there was a tradition of exchanging gifts. These were typically not your major Christmas-sized gifts, but something minimal that would just kind of fulfill the needs that people have for this kind of gift-giving exchange. That was basically the nature of it.
Got it. So you were around 10 years old at the time. And on one of these occasions, you were presented with a New Year's gift by one of your relatives. What was the gift? And paint a picture for me of the moment when you received it.
Yeah, so I'm roughly 10 years old. And as you can imagine, as a child, receiving gifts is a lot of fun, right? And getting new things is always joyous. And everybody's going around handing out their gifts one at a time. And I do remember distinctly this family member, this was a distant family member, giving me a pretty large item, which is already exciting.
We tend to think large items are going to be great. And upon unwrapping it, I found that it was a tin of popped popcorn. And I had absolutely no idea what to do with this. I mean, it was just the biggest letdown, right? As a kid, you want toys or candy or something that's going to make you have a lot of fun. And a tin of popcorn, it was just not anything remotely what I was expecting.
So to say I was disappointed is probably an understatement. I think I was a polite child and I said, thank you. And we moved on with our evening. But yeah, it was not exactly the perfect gift.
I understand another time you got a key chain from some Caribbean island as one of these gifts.
That's right. It was a keychain that somebody picked up as a souvenir on some Caribbean adventure. And it was given to me in this New Year's context exchange, which just doesn't make any sense. I wasn't at that island. I was a 10-year-old who doesn't have any keys. I had no idea what I was supposed to be doing with this. But again, you say politely thank you and move on with the evening.
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Chapter 4: How do bad gifts affect relationships?
This is Hidden Brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam. When big holidays roll around, many of us find ourselves awash in bad gifts. We may smile and say thank you, but inside we ask, what made you think I would want something so hideous? At Carnegie Mellon University, Jeff Gallick studies the psychology of gift-giving.
Jeff, many of us dream of giving the perfect gift, something that is surprising and meaningful that sends the recipient over the moon. I want to play you a clip of what the perfect gift-giving moment looks like in our fantasies.
This is from the TV show The Big Bang Theory, where the character Penny, who works as a waitress at a restaurant, gives her neighbor Sheldon, who's a theoretical physicist and a huge Star Trek fan, a most unusual present.
Here.
Oh, a napkin.
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Chapter 5: What is the role of obligation in gift-giving?
Turn it over.
To Sheldon. Live long and prosper. Leonard Nimoy. He came into the restaurant. Sorry the napkin's dirty. He wiped his mouth with it.
I possess the DNA of Leonard Nimoy? So acquiring the DNA of Mr. Spock himself earned Penny the reaction we all look for when we give gifts. In reality, of course, things usually don't turn out like this. Jeff, you've studied how and why gift giving goes wrong. And one significant cause of bad gifts is that gift givers and gift receivers are focused on entirely different time frames.
What are gift givers focused on?
Gift givers overwhelmingly are focused on that moment of exchange. So in the clip that you just played, that moment that Sheldon opens up the gift and sees that it's from Leonard Nimoy, that is what gift givers are trying to optimize on. They're trying to say, how can I put the biggest smile on someone's face the moment that they open the gift and realize what it is that they have?
So what are recipients focused on?
To some extent, they're focused on that as well. But to a greater extent, they're also thinking about the experience of that gift over the ownership of the gift. So when you receive something in the moment, it might make you happy, but does it actually provide you value and utility and joy for the duration of owning whatever it is that you've received?
And sometimes the things that bring you happiness in the moment are not the things that bring you happiness in the long term.
So this fundamental difference in priorities, a focus on the immediate and the short term versus a focus on the long term, produces other mismatches. Tell us about the surprise factor, Jeff.
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Chapter 6: How do gift givers and recipients differ in their expectations?
Absolutely. And one of the consequences of that is not only are you trying to give a gift at that point that's beneficial to the recipient, but you want to make sure that you're not one-upped. So an example of this in some of the work that I've done is if I give you a bottle of wine, a really well-liked bottle of wine, and it's going to make you happy.
But another friend gave you two bottles of wine, I look terrible, right? I look like I'm a cheapskate because I didn't give you enough. And so I'm very motivated to not be put in that position. And so some of the work we've looked at says, you know, imagine if you had a scenario where you knew that this other person was going to give two bottles of wine.
Would you spend more to say give three bottles of wine now? And people overwhelmingly say yes.
So you mentioned a second ago that one of the hidden motivations of gift giving is that it can serve as a means to acquire social approval or status. Do recipients attach the same store by expensive gifts as gift givers do?
Not nearly as much as you would think. So one of the big findings in this literature is that, for example, the cost of a gift is not nearly as predictive in terms of happiness of the recipient as people tend to think. And so that translates to the prestige of the gift as well as, you know, the store that you're buying it from.
People think, you know, the more you spend, the happier the person's going to be. And the evidence on that is very thin.
Have you ever received a particularly expensive gift that made you either anxious about reciprocation or just sort of befuddled about why such an expensive gift was purchased?
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Chapter 7: What is the impact of surprise in gift-giving?
I've received expensive gifts. I'm very fortunate in that way. But they've always been in contexts where reciprocation was not obvious. And this speaks to some of the norms that exist in gift giving that are very nuanced. So one thing that comes to mind is when my wife and I bought our new home, my parents actually bought us a retractable awning for our backyard. which is a really expensive gift.
That's a multi-thousand dollar gift. It's not something that you would normally get. There was no expectation that I would reciprocate that to my parents, in part because there's a norm that exists, which is that gifting down generations is very different than gifting up generations. And so that was a wonderful gift. We use this all the time, especially in the summer.
It provides a lot of shade, but there's really no expectation that I'm gonna spend $10,000 on my parents.
So we talked a second ago about how gift giving can be a form of status seeking. And one of these forms of status seeking can involve giving socially conscious gifts that highlight the giver's commitment to a virtuous cause, such as gifts to charity made in the recipient's name.
I want to play you a clip from the TV show Home Economics in which a character named Sarah chides her brother Connor for not prominently displaying the gifts that she has given him in the past.
So I was looking around, and I didn't see those Tibetan sound bowls. The ones I got you last Christmas. Oh, yeah, no, I never opened those. But it was a gift. Yeah, you suck at gifts. You didn't know that? I've been trying to get her there. After you got me that novel about that girl in Peru who gets cancer. Fernanda's Miracle. And that bracelet made by genius women.
Indigenous women, and it was an anklet. I just started tossing your gifts in the closet without unwrapping them. You never got me a puppy, did you? I think we're running low on shrimp.
Jeff, what has research found about giving socially conscious presence?
I'm reluctant to answer your question because I think socially conscious gifts are, for society, a wonderful thing. But the research is pretty clear on this, that recipients do not value them nearly as much as givers hope they would.
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Chapter 8: Should we rethink our approach to gift-giving?
Gifts and gift exchangers are supposed to be about generosity, kindness, and caring. But below the surface of these prosocial goals lie complex psychological forces. Many gift givers, consciously or unconsciously, prioritize their own needs over the preferences of recipients. At Carnegie Mellon University, Jeff Gallick studies the psychology of gift giving.
He's found that in order to give good gifts, we need to get over ourselves. We need to start by really trying to see the world from the perspective of recipients. Jeff, there's something of a conundrum here. We've all been gift givers and we've all also been gift receivers as well.
So we know what it's like to receive a bad gift or a gift that's principally designed to stroke the egos of gift givers. And yet the moment we become gift givers, many of us forget the lessons that we have learned. Why do you think that happens?
It's really difficult to learn in large part because when we're in the role of a gift giver or the role of a gift recipient, we don't spontaneously choose to take the other perspective. This is a form of what we call focalism.
We focus on the experience that we're in and we kind of neglect the alternative experience that might be out there, which would be the other perspective, the recipient or the giver. And so it's very hard to do that. And it's also a little bit disingenuous, I think, of me to just say, hey, everybody should be better because I have the luxury of running experiments.
I can learn what good practices are because I have random assignment as an experimenter. I have the ability to observe multiple worlds basically simultaneously, the case where someone is a giver and the case that someone is a receiver. You and I living in the real world as givers and receivers experience We can't possibly have the opposite experience, right?
If I give a gift, I cannot simultaneously operate as a recipient with all the same constraints around me. It's just not, it's impossible. And so learning under that environment is very challenging because we're constantly being reinforced with whatever conceptions we have as a giver when we're in a giver state and the same when we're in a recipient state.
I'm wondering how social norms might also exacerbate this problem, Jeff. When you received a tub of popcorn from your relative, the social norms told you, be polite, thank your relative. And so you thank the relative, and the relative presumably goes away thinking, boy, I came up with a really clever gift.
Instead of you telling the relative the truth, which is, I have absolutely no idea why you gave this to me. Is the constraints that we have in terms of the way we talk about gifts one of the reasons in some ways that we don't learn what recipients actually like?
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