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This is my favorite time of the year, partly due to the fact that I really enjoy giving gifts to friends and family. A great deal of thought goes into that process, as I typically begin thinking about Christmas gifts at the end of the summer. I want each present to reflect the caring I have for the gift recipient.
When my oldest daughter turned 18, I wanted her graduation gift to be extraordinarily special. Finally, I came up with the perfect gift. I spent months writing a 100-page essay about her life.
I have a few sacred rules about gift giving: Don’t give money or gift cards. I also avoid buying people what they say they want. I’ve always thought a gift would reflect more caring if I could come up with something that was not on a person’s wish list.
I’ve been reading research on the psychology of giving and receiving gifts, and I’ve come to a painful conclusion: Everything I believed about gift giving is scientifically wrong!
People actually prefer to receive a gift card rather than another type of present. This gives recipients the flexibility to buy what they really want rather than discard some useless item. Giving money may make gift-givers like me feel uncomfortable, but it resulted in higher levels of satisfaction among recipients.
What about avoiding items on people’s preference lists? Again, the experts say that my approach is mistaken. Researchers at Harvard and Stanford, have conducted a series of experiments looking at that issue. In several different types of studies, gift-recipients clearly rated their strong preference for gift-givers to simply give them what they wanted rather than any surprise item.
Should my actions be guided by scientific facts or personal feelings? What about all of the effort I spend thinking about what would be meaningful gifts to my family? Is gift-giving really as simple just buying people what they say they want?
For now I’m just going to dismiss this research as “incomplete” and continue to give long essays as gifts, search stores for something unusual and enjoy the time I spend thinking about the very special people in my life.
Gregory Ramey is a child psychologist and vice president of outpatient services at the Children’s Medical Center of Dayton.
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