The Gift-Giving Blues: Are Bad Presents Worse Than None at All?

If you struck out on gift-giving this year, pleasing no one and getting nothing you liked, maybe next year just hand over cash. Or maybe not.

In a recent article, economist and free market happy warrior Arthur Brooks said that the word from economists is that “gifts we buy others are worth up to a third less to them than what they would buy for themselves if we just gave them the money instead.” So, really the value of our gift-giving is less than the value of our dollars.

But that sounds a little grinchy so Brooks looked into whether the old saying that “it’s the thought that counts” really means something. Apparently, he found, social science says the adage only goes so far in a relationship. One study showed that individuals are more likely to perseverate on the meaning and intent behind a bad gift than the meaning and intent behind a good one. Not much good can come from blowing it when giving a gift to a loved one, but hopefully the relationship is strong enough to survive.

On the bright side, Brooks writes that the research shows that giving the perfect gift isn’t all that important for people in new relationships.

In a 2008 study in the journal Social Cognition, four psychologists conducted an experiment in which young men and women who had just met gave one another gift certificates. Unbeknown to the participants, the researchers manipulated the gifts, giving half of the recipients popular certificates, and the other half embarrassing ones.

Let’s consider this from the point of view of a participant. You sign up for an experiment to help out a professor, because you’re a good person. You meet an attractive person in the experiment, and give him or her a certificate to a nice bookstore. Maybe he or she will go out with you later, right? It turns out the researcher switches your gift for a certificate for something like acne cream. Perhaps someone should do a study about why psychologists don’t want you to be happy.

So what happened in the experiment when the participants got a bad gift? The answer depended on gender. Women who got an undesirable certificate shrugged it off, while men who got bad certificates judged themselves to be very dissimilar from the women who gave them. In other words, it’s easier for women to wreck a new relationship with a bad gift.

Fortunately, in perhaps the most unsurprising finding of the decade, scholars in the science journal PLOS One published an article in 2013 with the self-explanatory title “Women Are Better at Selecting Gifts Than Men.” Somebody actually might have gotten tenure figuring that one out.

Meantime, psychologists counter that people are happier when they focus on the meaning of the holidays rather than the mercantile rituals associated with them, leading Brooks to reveal some simple truths.

Try to give people what they value, but if you mess up, it isn’t a big deal to the people who truly love you. Above all, give of yourself, and share your faith and affection abundantly.

So, did you get the gift you wanted this holiday? And if not, are you mad at someone for the gift you did get or for the one you didn’t get? If you are upset, you may want to reevaluate your relationship. You may also have missed the reason for the season.

Read Arthur Brooks’ article on gift-giving here.

Major Life Decisions: How Much Influence Does a Coin Toss Have?

Steven Levitt, a well-known economist of “Freakonomics” fame, has a new paper on a topic that we can all relate to: How do people make big, pivotal life decisions? And how can we evaluate whether we make good ones?

When I stop and think about it, the relative scarcity of a robust literature on this topic is surprising. What could be a more pressing or pertinent subject? But — among other difficulties — it is incredibly difficult to create a controlled environment with the kind of randomization that you need for rock-solid results.

Let me explain. To try and measure whether some small behavior makes people happier, researchers could simply randomly assign participants into “Group 1” and “Group 2” and impose different conditions on each. This ensures that people with preexisting differences aren’t self-selecting into different groups and polluting the direct causal link that you’re trying to measure.

This approach — create a controlled environment, randomly divide your participants into “treatment” and “control” groups, and then measure how they fare — works great for studying things like new medications. But not so much for studying major life decisions: whether to get married, what kind of person to marry, and whether to move across the country for a new job. It turns out people aren’t willing to surrender those decisions to a social scientist in the name of advancing science. Weird, I know.

That’s where this study gets creative. Levitt did the best he could to “randomize” decisions by looking at the impact of a coin toss on people’s likelihood of making certain decisions. First, he recruited more than 10,000 volunteers. Each one took a survey that asked about a big decision they were facing. Then came the interesting part: Levitt’s website presented participants with a coin flip that “told” them which choice to make. After the experiment, Levitt followed up with the recruits to see what they decided and how happy they were.

Obviously, participants weren’t bound to follow through and obey the virtual coin. So the first question the study examined was: How much does a virtual coin flip impact which choice people end up making? And as funny as it seems, it turned out that the coin flip influenced participants’ decision making a lot. Taking account of a range of other factors, Levitt finds participants who got heads were about 25 percent more likely to make the change they were considering. And these weren’t insignificant decisions. Some of the changes the participants were mulling included quitting their job or separating from their spouse.

Equally interesting, the people who went ahead and made the change they were considering usually wound up happier as a result. Among the participants who were considering “important” decisions, those who decided to make a change later reported being a full point happier (on a 1–10 scale) than those who stuck with the status quo. Maybe there’s a lesson here: If you find a potential decision sufficiently compelling that you can’t get it off your mind, you should probably just pull the trigger. (Check out my Valentine’s Day column from 2015, “Taking Risks in Love,” for one practical application of this principle.)

The potential lesson here is intriguing. The results suggest that people leave a chunk of potential happiness untapped simply by tethering themselves to the status quo. Even a randomized virtual signal from a stranger in academia was enough to give people a little momentum and push them toward improving their lives.