Why is gift-giving so stressful?
Where givers and recipients read the same gift differently, why a wide shelf makes the shop harder, and what narrows the gap.
Answer to the question
Why is gift-giving so stressful?
Gift-giving is stressful because the giver chooses without seeing the recipient's side. In studies, givers expected higher prices to earn more appreciation, and recipients' appreciation did not follow price. A wide shelf adds the cost of every option passed over, and close ties add a second aim: signalling the bond.
Key takeaways
- In three studies by Francis Flynn and Gabrielle Adams, givers expected a more expensive gift to earn more appreciation, and recipients' appreciation did not follow the price.
- Ernest Baskin and colleagues found that givers, standing further from a gift, weigh how desirable it is, while receivers lean towards whether it is feasible.
- Barry Schwartz's The Paradox of Choice argues that each alternative passed over carries a cost in the mind and that regret falls mainly on the person responsible for the choice.
- Across six experiments, givers choosing for several recipients often gave each a different gift, even when recipients would not compare and another gift would have been better liked (Steffel and Le Boeuf, 2014).
- In five registry studies, close givers were more likely than distant givers to pick items from outside the registry to signal the relationship (Ward and Broniarczyk, 2016).
Givers in a set of three studies expected a pricier gift to be appreciated more, and recipients' appreciation did not rise with the price. That gap sits at the centre of gift-giving, where two people stand on either side of one object and see different things in it, and it is one reason gift-giving feels stressful before anything is wrapped. The studies measure predictions and appreciation, not stress itself, so what follows describes the mismatches that give a giver cause to worry, and a book on choice supplies the part about the shop.
What Does Each Seat See?
In the shop the giver holds a budget, a picture of the recipient and a hope. At the opening the recipient holds the object. Price is the dial a giver can see and turn, and in the studies by Francis Flynn and Gabrielle Adams it was the dial givers trusted, even though recipients' appreciation did not follow it.
Part of the pull is that price looks like effort: givers appear to treat an expensive gift as a thoughtful one, so the figure on the tag feels like evidence of care in gift-giving, and recipients in these studies did not read it that way. The authors suggest that a giver's own time as a recipient may not help much when choosing for someone else.
Distance changes what each side weighs. Ernest Baskin and colleagues drew on construal level theory to show that givers, who stand further from the gift, think of it more abstractly and weigh how desirable it is, while receivers, who will have to use it, lean towards whether it is feasible. Givers were sensitive to how far they stood from the receiver, and receivers were not sensitive to how far they stood from the giver. The authors also report that gift choices were not guided by the receiver's happiness as closely as givers believed.
Neither seat is wrong about its own view. The giver is right that desirability matters, and the receiver is right that a gift has to work in an ordinary week. Gift-giving asks each side to guess how the other weighs the two, and the giver has to guess first, in a shop, before the occasion arrives.
| What is compared | From the shop | From the opening |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Givers expected a higher price to earn more appreciation | Recipients' appreciation did not follow the price |
| What gets weighed | Desirability, the idea of the gift | Feasibility, whether it can be used |
| Distance | Givers were sensitive to how far they stood from the receiver | Receivers were not sensitive to how far they stood from the giver |
Does a Wider Shelf Help?
A shop adds a burden to gift-giving that the opening never shows. In The Paradox of Choice, Barry Schwartz argues that every alternative passed over carries a cost in the mind, so the more alternatives there are, the more the chosen one is judged against what was left behind. He adds that regret falls mainly on the person who bears responsibility for a poor outcome. A gift is a choice made on someone else's behalf and owned entirely by the chooser, which is the setting where his argument about regret applies most directly.
The recipient meets one object and never sees the shelf it came from, so the weighing that cost the giver most is out of sight at the moment the gift is judged. A giver who spent an hour comparing twenty options and a giver who picked the first reasonable one can hand over the same parcel.
Schwartz treats gifts as a familiar place for the search for the best option to appear: the questionnaire he reports for measuring that habit, called maximising, includes an item about finding it hard to shop for a friend's gift. He also notes that a major review found the average effect of option numbers on choice to be small, with large effects in both directions, so the claim is that a wide shelf can weigh on a chooser in some conditions and not in all. The same question is taken up in Choice Overload After the Jam Study.
Shopping for several people at once adds another pull. Across six experiments, Mary Steffel and Robyn Le Boeuf found that givers choosing for more than one recipient often passed up the gift a recipient would have liked best and gave each person a different one, even when the recipients would never compare. The motive appeared to be thoughtfulness, a wish to treat each person as unique.
The reward for that effort is hard to read from the shop. Yan Zhang and Nicholas Epley report that givers mispredict when their thoughts will count for a recipient. Gift-giving carries both the value of the object and the meaning of the exchange, and the thought behind a gift may matter to a receiver more at some moments than others, which the giver does not experience from the shop's side.
What Narrows the Gap in Gift-Giving?
Closeness adds a second aim to the first. Morgan Ward and Susan Broniarczyk studied gift registries in five studies and found that close givers were more likely than distant givers to pick items from outside the registry in order to signal the relationship, especially when they would receive credit for the choice. Distant givers, in turn, chose items that matched the recipient's preferences better. A close giver is therefore weighing two things at once, what the recipient wants and what the gift says about the bond, and a distant giver has less of the second to settle. A handmade gift is one way of showing care through the object itself, as Why We Pay More for Handmade describes.
Steffel and Le Boeuf found that turning givers' attention to recipients' preferences reduced the urge to individualise and helped them choose gifts that were better liked. Schwartz's own suggestion for the shop is to decide what counts as good enough and stop there, which shrinks the shelf the chooser keeps comparing against. A card hands the choice back to the recipient and brings its own questions, which Why We Leave Gift Cards Unspent takes up.
None of this removes the work of choosing. It moves some of it: a registry or a short list from the recipient narrows the shelf before the giver arrives, and a short shelf is easier to leave without a sense of what was missed. Gift-giving becomes lighter when the two seats share information, and closeness changes how much a thought is worth. Zhang and Epley also report that the thought counted more when the social connection between giver and receiver was raised.
Common questions
Why is gift-giving so stressful?
Gift-giving puts a giver, who chooses with a limited view of the recipient's side, in front of a recipient who judges one object. Studies find that givers expect high prices and unrequested surprises to land better than recipients report, and a wide shelf adds the cost of every option passed over.
Do more expensive gifts make people appreciate them more?
In three studies by Flynn and Adams, givers expected that they would, and recipients' appreciation did not follow the price.
Do close friends and distant acquaintances choose differently?
In five studies of gift registries by Ward and Broniarczyk, close givers were more likely than distant givers to choose items from outside the registry to signal the relationship, while distant givers' choices matched recipients' preferences better.
Sources
Schwartz, B. The Paradox of Choice. Seed book; vault hub Books/The Paradox of Choice.
Flynn, F. J., & Adams, G. S. (2009). Money can't buy love: Asymmetric beliefs about gift price and feelings of appreciation. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45(2), 404-409. doi:10.1016/j.jesp.2008.11.003 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jesp.2008.11.003
Baskin, E., Wakslak, C. J., Trope, Y., & Novemsky, N. (2014). Why feasibility matters more to gift receivers than to givers: A construal-level approach to gift giving. Journal of Consumer Research, 41(1), 169-182. doi:10.1086/675737 https://doi.org/10.1086/675737
Steffel, M., & Le Boeuf, R. A. (2014). Overindividuation in gift giving: Shopping for multiple recipients leads givers to choose unique but less preferred gifts. Journal of Consumer Research, 40(6), 1167-1180. doi:10.1086/674199 https://doi.org/10.1086/674199
Zhang, Y., & Epley, N. (2012). Exaggerated, mispredicted, and misplaced: When it's the thought that counts in gift exchanges. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 141(4), 667-681. doi:10.1037/a0029223 https://doi.org/10.1037/a0029223
Ward, M. K., & Broniarczyk, S. M. (2016). Ask and you shall (not) receive: Close friends prioritize relational signaling over recipient preferences in their gift choices. Journal of Marketing Research, 53(6), 1001-1018. doi:10.1509/jmr.13.0537 https://doi.org/10.1509/jmr.13.0537