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The whirlwind of the holidays can make it easier or harder to maintain a healthy perspective on who you are and your place in the world. This is the second in a series of three posts I'll write this week on maintaining perspective. The first one focused on political perspective, this one focuses on giving and receiving gifts, and the third will be about having a healthy perspective when it comes to expectations.
During the holiday season we often find ourselves as both gift givers and gift receivers, and year after year there is a strong disconnect between these two roles. Research on giving and receiving gifts sheds some light on how we can maintain perspective during the gift-giving season and reconcile our differing desires as gift-giver and gift-receiver.
As gift-givers, we want to find a thoughtful gift that shows the person how much we care and how well we know them. Being able to surprise someone with the perfect gift is the optimal achievement in gift-giving. Buying a gift off an Amazon wish list or simply asking someone what they want feels thoughtless, cheapening the whole experience. And choosing a thoughtful gift does have some benefits—people tend to feel close to their gift recipient if they put thought into the gift.
But when we are the gift-receiver, we just want to get what we want. People are most excited to receive the toy they’ve been dreaming about. The thoughtfulness of the gift may not even factor in unless people do not like the gift—then they try to figure out what was going through the gift-giver's mind when they chose it. When we are receiving gifts, we wish someone would just ask us what we want and stick to the list.
In a perfect gifting world, we would all be able to thoughtfully discover the exact item that the other person couldn't live without (but didn't even know it). I know I have spent hours and hours trying to achieve this perfect gift. But the cold truth is that I have achieved that ideal very rarely in my decades of gift-giving. Instead the more common choices are to try to get something for someone that you aren’t sure they really want, or just ask them what they want and get that. Research shows that gift-receivers prefer the second.
So when you find yourself a gift-giver, if you don’t already have a perfect gift in mind, don’t be afraid to just ask someone what they want. If it makes you feel cheap or thoughtless, try to maintain perspective and remember that giving them what they want is the thoughtful thing to do. You are following some research-based advice and overriding your overwhelming impulse to put a lot of thought into their gift, and that is a very thoughtful move indeed!
When you find yourself in the position of receiving a gift, take some time to think about how thoughtful it is (whether or not you like it). Think about how much time and effort that person put into finding a gift they hoped you would like. Thank them for their thoughtfulness so they don't feel cheap and thoughtless. Research shows that actively thinking about the thoughtfulness behind a gift makes you appreciate it more, and thanking them for it will make them feel better too.
More posts on thriving and surviving the holiday season:
References
Gino, F., & Flynn, F. (2011). Give them what they want: The benefits of explicitness in gift exchange. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(5), 915-922.
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), 667-81.
