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Are you worried about what to buy your friends and family for the holidays this year? If you are, you’re not alone. Anxiety around choosing the right gifts is incredibly common. Not only do we want to avoid insensitive and offensive gifts that might undermine our relationships with loved ones, but we also want to give a gift that the recipient will adore.
To achieve this goal, people engage in a variety of strategies to try and deduce which products their loved ones want.
Trying to imagine what someone would like as a gift can be exhausting. Psychologists have shown that the skill needed to decipher someone else’s wants (known as perspective-taking) requires considerable mental effort. So much so that when people are distracted, they are less able to imagine how someone else thinks or feels. Neurological evidence also demonstrates that perspective-taking is effortful. The pre-frontal brain areas associated with deliberate, effortful reasoning become active when people are instructed to take the perspective of someone else.
Yet despite expending all this effort, engaging in the mental acrobatics needed to take someone’s perspective can actually hinder our gift choices, leading us to overthink, and subsequently overlook, simple and beloved gift choices.
This year, try to avoid the following common mistakes.
1. Choosing What You Would Like
When we try to take someone else’s perspective in order to decipher what they would want as a gift, we may erroneously rely on our own tastes and preferences as a guide. People tend to overestimate the extent to which other people share their feelings and attitudes. When browsing online or in-store, our eyes dart to products that we ourselves would like to receive. However, although we may expect our loved ones to feel the same joy upon unwrapping these items as we would, they are likely to be disappointed. This gift-giving mistake is a result of relying on the wrong type of perspective-taking.
Psychologist Daniel Batson distinguishes between two types of perspective-taking: self perspective-taking and other perspective-taking. Self perspective-taking is when you imagine how you would feel receiving a gift. It is likely unwise to rely on self perspective-taking unless you are uncannily similar to your recipient. Instead, try other perspective-taking. This is where you imagine how your recipient would feel receiving a gift, taking into account their unique tastes and preferences.
This is easier said than done because it requires that we know our recipient very well. It may also require that we put aside our own opinions and judgments temporarily. Perhaps you disapprove of violent video games, highly-processed foodstuffs, or political humor. Buying the perfect gift may require buying a product that you wouldn’t normally consider.
2. Ignoring the Registry
Our desire to choose the perfect gift is driven not only by the desire to make our friends and family happy but also by wanting to demonstrate intimate knowledge of them. Gifts function as social signals, indicating that the giver understands the recipients' preferences. Often gift-givers feel the need to infer the recipient’s desires without needing to be told. For this reason, people may choose to ignore gift registries and wish lists because a purchase from a registry does not express the depth of understanding the gift giver wants to show.
However, research suggests that people are more appreciative of gifts they explicitly request than those they do not. Although we may think that people will consider our unsolicited gifts to be more thoughtful and considerate, recipients of these gifts do not agree. In a recent research study, married American adults were asked about wedding gifts they had received. They reported receiving a wide variety of gifts, including airline tickets, jewelry, pottery, gift cards, and home décor. But regardless of the gift and how much it cost, people reported appreciating the gifts that were chosen from their registry much more than those that weren’t.
If friends and family have sent you a wish list this year, do not presume to know what they want better than they do themselves.
3. Selecting Goods Over Experiences
We live in a world with an unprecedented abundance of material goods. Of course, this is not true for everyone, and people with severely limited resources still (rightfully) worry about satisfying basic needs such as food, shelter, and clothing. But the fortunate majority in developed countries own a dazzling array of goods, gadgets, and gizmos. In fact, we have so many things that we often end up purchasing extra storage to hold them.
However, increases in material goods, beyond fulfilling basic needs, has produced virtually no measurable gains in our psychological or physical well-being. A nationwide survey of 1,279 Americans, aged 21– 69, found that more happiness is gained by purchasing experiences, such as a spa day or tickets to a show, or by receiving such experiences as a gift, than by receiving a material good, such as clothing or jewelry.
With restrictions due to the coronavirus this year, consider creating experiences in your own home. For example, hours of fun can be had by playing board games as a family or signing up for online cookery classes with a spouse. These gifts can create wonderful shared experiences that you can all treasure for years to come.
4. Over-Individuating
When planning our holiday gifts, we often feel the need to buy a different gift for each person on our list, even if the recipients won’t actually meet each other. However, research suggests that feeling the need to give different gifts to each person can lead us to pass up gifts that would be better liked by one or more of our loved ones. This phenomenon is called over-individuation, and it seems to arise because givers are trying to be thoughtful by treating each recipient as unique. Consistent with this, when researchers encouraged gift-givers to be thoughtful, over-individuation increased.
In order to avoid over-individuating this year, focus on recipients' preferences. If you think your cousin and your great aunt would both love the same gift, go ahead and buy it for both of them.
5. Focusing on Price
Many gift-givers use price as a guide when making decisions about gift purchases, assuming a higher price point makes for a better gift. Needless to say, marketing campaigns and sales associates will likely encourage this belief in order to improve their company profits or individual commission.
However, recent research suggests that although gift-givers expect a positive correlation between how much they spent on a gift and how much it is appreciated, recipients, in contrast, reported no such association between gift price and their appreciation.
In a recent piece of research by psychologists Flynn and Adams, engaged women were asked how much they appreciated their engagement ring. Their appreciation was not related in any way to the cost of the ring. Interestingly, however, their fiancés erroneously believed that the price did matter. Men who purchased more expensive rings believed their partner appreciated them more. In another study, similar results were also obtained for birthday presents.
Flynn and Adams do not believe that our tendency to focus on price is due to an ostentatious need to display our wealth. Instead, they suggest the people erroneously assume that more expensive gifts convey more thoughtfulness and will therefore be appreciated more. But the data does not support this belief. So, this year, when browsing for gifts, don’t let price be your guide.
6. Refusing to Ask Questions
What if you just can’t decide what to get someone? Perhaps every year, you spend hours choosing a gift for a particularly hard-to-buy-for family member, only to see the disappointment in their eyes when they open it.
First, cut yourself some slack. Trying to comprehend the contents of another person’s mind is likely the most complicated task that any of us undertake regularly. The human brain, with roughly one hundred billion interconnected neurons, can be active in more possible configurations than there are elementary particles in the known universe. Given this complexity, is it any wonder it’s hard to decipher the desires of another human being?
But we do have one final tool at our disposal—asking questions.
In a series of research studies, psychologists Eyal, Steffel, and Epley challenged romantic couples to identify their partner's tastes and preferences by any strategy they could think of. Couples who asked questions consistently outperformed everyone else, even those who spent time engaging in deliberate and effortful perspective-taking.
Choosing the best gift for another person may require gaining new information rather than utilizing existing knowledge that you already have.
This does not necessarily mean you need to ask your friends and family exactly what they would like as a present. However, gaining some additional information is likely to improve your choice of gift. For example, if you have a gift in mind, you could ask clarifying questions about sizes or colors. If you are struggling to choose between two gifts, you could ask which they would prefer. If you need some guidance on where to start, you could ask about whether they prefer gifts that are fun, pretty, or practical.
Choosing the perfect gift is a difficult task, littered with potential problems and pitfalls. This year, make it easier for yourself by asking questions.
