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To Be a Great Gift Giver, Do These 3 Things
Become a favorite gift giver with three simple steps.
Posted December 2, 2020
About 40-50% of Americans expect to return at least one gift they received during the holiday season.
With this post, I’ll ensure that gift isn’t one you gave.
Gift giving is an important social behavior: holidays, birthdays, life events, and more. And with the holiday season right around the corner (or already here judging by retail stores’ music selection), today’s post will teach you how to make your gifts generate the strongest and most positive attitudes they can.
1. Do as Your Recipient Requests.
People and their preferences are complicated things. We have a multitude of different wants and wishes, and those wants and wishes shift over time. Thus, trying to accurately guess what gift recipients will like can prove very difficult.
So, the best piece of advice with gift giving? Choose a present the person asked for. Whether the item is listed explicitly on a wish list or told to you verbatim, buy them what they’re asking for.
Gift givers mistakenly think that choosing a gift off someone’s wish list will be perceived as insincere or thoughtless. However, the research shows just the opposite.
For example, researchers had participants choose a gift for a friend that was either requested by the person (on their Amazon.com wish list) or unrequested by the person (but was something the gift giver thought they would like). Then, the researchers asked the gift recipients what they thought about the gift selected for them.
Not only did the gift recipients in the requested (vs. unrequested) condition report liking these gifts more, they actually thought it was a more thoughtful gift, too!
2. Focus on the Gift’s Feasibility.
Sometimes, you don’t have an explicit wishlist to work with. Or, even if you do, there are multiple gifts to choose between. So, what features of gifts should you focus on in making your decision?
Largely, there are two features that givers consider: the gift’s desirability (i.e., the overall quality of the item) versus the gift’s feasibility (i.e., the ease or convenience of the item).
For example, imagine you were choosing between two pressure cookers to get a person. One of them has a lot of different features and settings (high desirability), whereas the other is much more user-friendly and easy to cook with (high feasibility).
Although gift givers think that high desirability is better, in fact, gift receivers value high feasibility more.
As a gift giver, people tend to focus too abstractly on why a gift is a good choice. Instead, they should focus more concretely on how the gift will be used or enjoyed, in other words, its feasibility.
3. Think About Long-Term Pleasure.
Oftentimes, when we think about picking out a gift, we imagine the gift recipient’s reaction to the moment they open it. This is called the “smile-seeking hypothesis:” The bigger we expect the person to smile in response to a gift, the more likely we are to choose it.
However, this strategy often backfires.
Although gift recipients might be happy at the moment of opening this present, it’s really the long-term satisfaction with the gift that makes a bigger difference. In other words, when picking out a present, try to choose something that is going to have a long-term benefit rather than something that generates short-term pleasure.
First, gift recipients are more likely to use a long-term gift over time, meaning they repeatedly bring to mind and associate you (the gift giver) with that positivity and value of the gift. Second, the accumulated pleasure over time is more valuable to gift recipients than the burst of pleasure they receive in the short-term.
And here’s one strategy to accomplish this: When choosing a gift, imagine you won’t be there to see their reaction. If you know you can’t witness them opening the gift, then you’re more likely to choose a gift that will bring them greater long-term happiness.
The Most Positive Gift Attitudes
One of the best compliments you can receive is being called a good “gift giver.” And with these three tips — choose something from their wishlist, focus on the user-friendliness of the gift, and select an item with long-term benefits — you’ll be sure to earn that title in no time.
And if you’re looking to make sure someone gets you a great gift this holiday season, well, you might refer them to this post.
References
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.
Yang, A. X., & Urminsky, O. (2018). The smile-seeking hypothesis: How immediate affective reactions motivate and reward gift giving. Psychological Science, 29(8), 1221-1233.
Gino, F., & Flynn, F. J. (2011). Give them what they want: The benefits of explicitness in gift exchange. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 47(5), 915-922.
