As you scour shopping websites and store aisles this season, captive to that frenzied, loving and exasperated hunt for perfect holiday gifts, here’s a little gift, of sorts, from researchers who study gift giving and receiving: Think gift card. Because the less specific the gift, the more it will be appreciated.
You shudder, you recoil. But the sad truth is that while gift cards constitute a minority of holiday gifts, according to the National Retail Federation, they have been the most popular gift request since 2007.
But you know your recipient best, right?
In studies to be presented early next year at a conference of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, researchers tried to analyze the emotional turmoil churned up by the exchanging of gifts, noting that the giver’s earnest intentions may often widely miss the mark of the recipient’s true desires.
When Mary Steffel, an assistant professor of marketing at the University of Cincinnati, and her colleagues asked subjects what kinds of gifts they preferred to give, the replies were specific and highly personalized.
Chained to the firmament that “it’s the thought that counts,” givers pride themselves on putting inordinate time and focus on tailoring gifts to fit receivers. And the closer the relationship, the more thought givers believe they should put into selecting a gift.
But when subjects were asked what they would like to receive, they overwhelmingly replied that they wanted credit-card gift cards, which would give them the flexibility to choose exactly what they want.
“We find that when people are thinking about what gifts they want to give, they focus on the recipients’ traits and personality,” Dr. Steffel said. “But when recipients are evaluating gifts, they’re thinking about their current wants or needs. So we encourage givers to focus on what the recipient would like, rather than what they are like.”
And when all else fails, she said, rather than overthinking, givers might try a simple solution: “Ask!”
Her line of research on gift giving was inspired partly by her own predilection for overthinking gift giving; for example, the pair of oven mitts she bought for her newlywed friends, individually monogrammed — the ones that ultimately never graced their kitchen and couldn’t be returned for store credit. One Christmas, her family obsessed over a present for her uncle: “We picked out the perfect shirt,” she recalled. “It was the right pattern, color, size and style. So much so that when he opened the gift, he happened to be wearing the exact same shirt.”
Ironically, other research has shown that if recipients like their gift, they don’t give much thought to how much effort the giver put into it. They’re too consumed, emotionally, with enjoying the thing itself.
But if recipients disdain the gift, they assume the giver put little effort and thought into it. “Thought and time counts more for the giver because it makes them feel closer to the receiver,” said Nicholas Epley, a professor of behavioral science at the University of Chicago.
Additional research shows why a gift card may be preferable to cash. Research published earlier this year in the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making found that recipients of cash felt obligated to use the money on utilitarian items. But when getting something labeled a “gift card,” whether to a particular store or tied to a credit card, recipients focused on the word “gift,” which gave them permission to treat themselves and indulge.
By far the biggest challenge for gift givers is shopping for picky people. That’s when asking — and, sigh, the gift card — can be particularly useful.
Evan Polman, a psychologist and assistant professor of marketing at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, found that of 7,466 Black Friday shoppers in 2013, 39 percent said they were shopping for recipients they defined as “picky.” He and his colleagues have identified two types of “picky” people.
One type’s preferences are relatively straightforward: They want the same things, all the time.
The more irritating type, Dr. Polman said, clearly has strong opinions, but givers often scratch their heads trying to discern what those opinions are.
“Givers believe that the receiver will be snobby and snarky about the gift,” Dr. Polman said, and assume that their picky recipients will return, regift or throw out the gift. “So they feel defeated,” he added. As a result, they typically either spend less on the picky person, skip the gift altogether or, indeed, settle upon a gift card.
Asking the picky person exactly what he or she wants would no doubt save a lot of time and emotional capital. Studies show that receivers appreciate those gifts more than imaginative guesses.
And yet many givers “don’t like to resort to these measures,” Dr. Polman said. “We feel we are copping out because we have to ask. It feels like a cold transaction: There’s no warmth in it. All the mystique of giving has been erased.”
Remember, if asking receivers their preference violates your deep-seated beliefs about gifting, there is, alas, always the gift card.
Either way, the picky person comes away satisfied.
“Picky receivers annoy givers, but they get what they want,” Dr. Polman said. “There’s some benefit to being picky.”