The 5 Types of Gift Givers
The 5 Types of Gift Givers
Exploring the psychology of gift giving. Recognize
anyone you know?
“I have 20 gifts to
buy,” a friend of mine moans. “It’s stressing me out.”
“My sister and
brother-in-law are impossible to please. I dread seeing her pursed lips when
she opens the package,” another confides.
Isn’t giving
presents supposed to make us happy? After all, the Bible does tell
us that it’s more blessed to give than to receive. Of course, in psychological
terms, it’s a bit more complicated than that.
First, there’s
the happiness thing: What
makes us happier—giving or receiving? Alas, the short answer is neither. Psychologists
Tim Kasser and Kennon M. Sheldon analyzed Christmas experiences that could make
people feel better and broke it down to seven:
1. Time with family
2. Religious
activities
3. Maintaining
traditions
4. Spending money on
gifts
5. Receiving gifts
6. Helping others
7. Sensual enjoyment
of the holiday (food and drink)
While family time
and religious activity did increase people’s sense of well-being, gifts—both
giving and receiving them—didn’t. Counterintuitive, but nonetheless true. As
Kasser and Sheldon write: “Despite the fact that people spend relatively large
portions of their income on gifts, as well as time shopping for and wrapping
them, such behavior apparently contributes little to holiday joy.” So much for
that.
Second, those
packages you see lying under the
Christmas tree aren’t just presents but symbolic markers. Yes, you heard
me right: Symbols of both relationships and the self. That’s why we all
remember the gifts we’ve been given—the good, the bad, and the genuinely
ugly—because we understand them as revealing the nature of the connections we
have to others. In his seminal article, “The Social Psychology of Gifts,” Barry
Schwartz writes that “Gifts are one of the ways in which the pictures others
have of us are transmitted.” Of course, the gift doesn’t just reveal the image
the giver has of you; it exposes the character and the thinking of the giver as
well.
Christmas giving
makes us anxious not just because it’s revelatory but because it’s an
exchange. We dread receiving the bad gift as much as giving it. In fact,
when John F. Sherry, Jr. and his colleagues explored what they called “The Dark
Side of the Gift,” they found that people are far more ambivalent and even
negative about gift-giving than the cultural tropes would suggest. Most
interesting is the bad or awful gift, and how people react to it.
Anecdotes confirm
not only how well people remember the bad gift but their feelings upon
receiving it. One woman recounts how the one parameter she gave her
mother-in-law was that all fabrics be natural. What did she send? A shirt made
of pure polyester. The symbolic nature of gift-giving has both a light and a
dark side, as stories make clear. One daughter recounts, “There’s a shelf in an
attic closet filled with prepster sweaters from my mother, all of them in pink
or green, and each a reminder of how she hates the way I dress. They’re
maternal rebukes, each and everyone. I could give them to Goodwill, of course,
but I hold on to them—in case my Christmas nostalgia threatens to take me
over.”
Another woman
recalls the first Christmas after she remarried, and sent gifts to her new
brother and sister-in-law: “I spent hours shopping for everyone in their family—them,
children and spouses, grandchild—and then wrapped everything and shipped it
off. They reciprocated by sending a single gift, intended for my husband. I was
surprised but went to do the same thing the next year but instead of feeling
good about giving, I felt stupid and pathetic. Once again, they sent a gift
intended for my husband. I got the message.”
“My brother’s
competitiveness this time of year makes me nuts,” a man tells me. “He makes
more money than I do and has fewer children so his gift is always a game of
one-upmanship. I try to ignore it but it never fails to get under my skin.” On
a personal note, the year my then-husband gave me brown socks (I don’t wear
brown) spoke volumes.
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In dysfunctional
families, gift-giving (or withholding) can become power plays or worse. I
wasn’t very old before I realized that telling my mother what I wanted for
Christmas was pretty much the kiss of death; the more I wanted it, the more
likely she was not to give it to me. Others report that sometimes siblings are
played off against each other in this way: “I really wanted a tennis racket but
my parents gave it to my sister Kim who had no interest in the sport. Things
like that happened every year.”
It turns out that
men and women react differently to the bad gift, especially in the context of
an intimate relationship. As Elizabeth W. Dunn and her colleagues explain,
gifts are also markers of similarity—the good gift confirms the
compatibility of romantic partners, as well as what they share. (If you’re
happily married, that’s how your spouse always “knows” exactly what you want.)
So what happens with a bad gift, beyond the even exchange at Bloomingdales or
Macy’s? That’s what Dunn and her cohorts wanted to find out. They hypothesized
that men would react to the undesirable gift by readjusting their vision of the
relationship while women, on the other hand, would be prone to “neutralize the
interpersonal threat” posed by the bad gift. Surprisingly enough, that’s
exactly what they found. While men were more likely to readjust their vision of
the relationship in response to the bad gift, women weren’t. They were more
likely to downplay or rationalize the significance of the bad gift.
Intriguingly, women also didn’t respond to the good gift with as much
enthusiasm for the relationship as did men. This led the researchers to wonder:
“Perhaps, then, women not only protect the relationship from the lows of events
such as bad gifts but also from unwarranted highs from events such as good
gifts.” All of this is quite surprising.
I offer up this
(unscientific) list of the potential givers in your life (and mine), as a way
of easing the stress of the
holidays a bit and giving you an edge on keeping your cool, not to mention your
holiday spirit.
See if you
recognize anyone you know!
1. The Genuine
Giver
If you are lucky
enough to have one or two of these folks in your life, it’s time for rejoicing.
The genuine giver has actually thought about you and what would give you
pleasure. Our culture likes to believe that everyone is a
genuine giver—if you doubt it, just re-read O. Henry’s The Gift of the
Magi—but maybe what really makes this kind of giving so special is that
it’s the exception, not the rule. That gives us all the more reason to
savor the moment. If you’re a genuine giver yourself, then all the studies
above don’t apply to you and I’m willing to bet that Christmas is your favorite
time of year.
2. The Status Hound
This is the costly
gift as self-enhancement—a show of money or power, or perhaps both. In
this case, the gift has nothing to do with the recipient but everything to do
with the giver. These are the gifts for which the exchange receipt was
invented, and the truth is that they aren’t emotionally painful unless the
giver is a true intimate—a lover or a spouse—in which case the status gift can
pack a big emotional wallop. (I’m disagreeing here with the research I’ve just
cited; I personally find this kind of gift very painful.) If you’d like to see
this in action, just replay The War of the Roses, especially
the Christmas scenes.
3. The Wolf in
Sheep’s Clothing
This is the giver
who likes to be thought of as a wonderful gift-giver with
perfectly wrapped gifts but his or her spirit is no more genuine than the
Status Hound; in the end, Christmas is all about him or her. The Wolf is likely
to send a check, rather than a present, and will “re-gift” items without thinking
about whether the gift actually suits the recipient. The Wolf likes gift-giving
to be even-steven—especially in terms of money spent—so beware of possible
posturing or pouting if he or she is disappointed. Paradoxically, the Wolf is
also likely to be a discriminating giver—within the family, some members will
be luckier than others since the Wolf doesn’t shy away from playing favorites, as
one woman recounts: “My brother doesn’t like my husband, though he is close to
my sister’s spouse and he doesn’t shy away from making it known when it comes
to the holidays. But the thing is that it’s so obvious—Jim gets a golf club
while my husband gets a CD or e-book—that it really doesn’t matter anymore.
It’s just become par for the season ... And the source of many inside
jokes.”
4. The Power Player
Perhaps the worst
kind of giver—the one who really knows how to manipulate the symbolic nature of
the gift—these people are the likeliest to hurt or disappoint us, especially at
the holidays. Because they understand how gifts can cause us pain, consciously
or unconsciously, they choose gifts that do exactly that.
Here’s one woman’s
story: “Everything my mother gave me for Christmas was either two sizes too
small or something that would be hideously unflattering. It was her way of
reminding me that I was overweight—as if I didn’t have a mirror and somehow
didn’t know.” A son tells how his parents—despite everything he’d told
them—gave his children wildly expensive toys and clothing which only increased
the tension between parents and grandparents. “My father likes to be thought of
as a great provider, and his gifts imply that I’m not. My wife and I aren’t comfortable
with our kids wearing designer jeans to school and we’ve told my parents that
but they don’t want to hear it. The holiday is always about him, not
us.”
5. The Complainer
Yes, it’s not just
that you have to appreciate the gift the Complainer gives you; you have to
listen endlessly to the travails and inconveniences he or she experienced this
holiday season, especially during the acquisition of your gift.
Luckily, the Complainer is easy to spot and more of a nuisance than anything
else, and one of the reasons wine is part of holiday celebrations.
With all that in mind, happy shopping and wrapping and, of course,
gifting! May your holidays be bright!
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