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Personality
Got Stress? You'll Spend Less (on Holiday Gifts, at Least)
Which personality traits separate the Scrooges from the Cratchits?
Posted December 26, 2020
It’s the day after the largest gift-giving holiday, and the results are in: How much did you spend? 2020 has not been a normal year in any conceivable way, and it has almost certainly affected this year’s holiday spending. Pandemic notwithstanding, there are also some personality differences that affect the degree of your holiday expenditures.
Holiday gatherings see the coming together of many different personalities, which can be both wonderful and difficult. I’ve gotten used to it after 14 years of marriage, but the first Christmas I spent with my spouse’s family was hard. I had heard that my mother-in-law had extravagant Christmases. But coming from a family that typically exchanged a small number of gifts, I was absolutely shocked when I emerged from our room on Christmas morning to find her large living room a veritable sea of packages.
They were stacked as high as the furniture such that there were barely walking paths, and only a few small areas in which to wedge one’s self to sit down. The piles of boxes and bags blended together such that we would accidentally open each other’s presents. It was an explosion of gifts such as I had never seen. Granted, all those gifts were for twice the people I was used to seeing in one place, but nonetheless the unfamiliar spectacle was unnerving to me in a way I couldn’t explain.
With such stark differences between that Christmas and what we did in my family, it left me wondering “why?” Certainly, some holiday spending habits simply come from different family traditions, but the gift-giver’s personality also influences how much one spends. I stumbled across a recent study called “Who Are the Scrooges?” that promised to shed some light on these perplexing family differences.
The 2019 study by Dr. Sara Weston and colleagues examined the relationship between 2,133 UK residents’ personality traits and holiday spending based on data from a money management app that logged spending across users’ bank accounts and credit cards. App users who agreed to participate in the study provided information about their personality traits and gave the researchers permission to access their anonymized transaction data. The researchers measured participants’ holiday spending by total money spent in the months of November and December.
Total holiday spending was related to a few key personality traits: extraversion, conscientiousness, and neuroticism. Holiday spending was positively correlated with extraversion, meaning that the more sociable, energetic, enthusiastic, and assertive a participant was, the more money they were likely to spend during these months. Similarly, spending was positively correlated with conscientiousness, a person’s tendency to be proactive, responsible, self-controlled, and organized. Neuroticism, a personality trait that represents people’s stress reactivity, anxiety, and moodiness, was negatively related to holiday spending; the more neurotic the participant, the less they were likely to spend.
The researchers wondered if these results were unique to holiday spending, or whether they were consistent with participants’ regular spending habits. They were also interested in whether these habits were influenced by participants’ incomes, since there are known associations between personality traits and one’s occupation and income. To find out, the researchers analyzed the data again, controlling for participants’ income and their typical two-month spending outside of the holiday season. As one would expect, participants with higher incomes and higher result spending spent more during the holiday season. Interestingly, when they removed the influence of these other variables, the relationship between holiday spending and conscientiousness was weakened, but the inverse association between neuroticism and holiday spending remained.
However, a new association emerged: when controlling for income and non-holiday spending, another trait, openness to experience, was negatively related to holiday spending. Openness to experience entails nontraditionality, imagination, valuing new ideas and experiences, creativity, and an interest in intellectual pursuits. The less traditional and more open the participants, the less they tended to spend in the months leading up to the holidays. Although the study did not assess how and why this association exists, it could be simply that people higher in openness are less beholden to traditional holiday norms, or it could be that they are more likely to gift items that do not entail a great deal of spending, such as experience or handmade items.
Another question asked by the research team was whether there were personality differences in people’s timelines for holiday spending. For example, you might think conscientious people buy their gifts earlier and sit back and laugh at all the less conscientious people as they endure the last-minute Christmas Eve scramble to find gifts due to their poor planning. Surprisingly, there was no association between spending more money on certain days of the holiday season and personality traits. However, they only assessed these associations during days in November and December, so it’s possible all the conscientious people like my own mother have in fact finished most of their holiday shopping well before November.
Although personality explains only a portion of our holiday spending habits, these results are evocative nonetheless. When I look at my family, I see these differences in living color. My enthusiastic and hyper-traditional mother-in-law throws lavish holidays, while my notoriously off-the-charts neurotic father-in-law refuses to spend a cent. As for me, a somewhat neurotic and highly open person, my approach to gift-giving is much more relaxed; I often give a few meaningful gifts, often handmade, and the handmade ones often at nontraditional times (“nontraditional times” sounds better than late, with apologies to Adam for the almost year-late handknit socks).
So who really are the Scrooges? We’ve seen from this study that people with certain personality characteristics spend less money during the holidays—people high in neuroticism, and low in openness to experience and extraversion. But does spending less money really make you a Scrooge? When we think of Ebenezer Scrooge, we think of someone who is miserly, yes, but he is also unkind, cold, and unsympathetic. In this study, when both looking at the raw numbers and when accounting for variables like yearly income and regular spending, one personality trait had zero significant associations with holiday spending: agreeableness. Agreeableness is basically niceness—highly agreeable people are warm, trusting, and sympathetic. It’s safe to say that Ebenezer Scrooge was none of those things before his big conversion.
By now, you may be thinking of your Scroogiest family member and wondering if you’ve misjudged them. So are your family members really Scrooges, or are they just different or stressed?
Heck, maybe they really are disagreeable. After all, I don’t know your life.
