That's the Hallmark version, anyway. The reality, as millions of us are remembering this holiday season, is that giving gifts is hard work, and the yearly process of finding one for everybody who expects one from us can feel like a series of taxing emotional tests. How well do we really know the people in our lives? How perceptive and creative are we, and how generous? How harshly will we be judged if we get it wrong?
Instead of wallowing in self-doubt, it's worth realizing that we're not crazy to find gift-giving difficult: As social interactions go, it's deeply complex, and has long been a topic of fascination for experts on human behavior. From developmental psychologists who have looked at gift-giving among babies, to hyper-
rational economists who have wondered why we don't all just give each other money instead of presents, researchers from across the social sciences have zeroed in on the ritual of gift exchange as a window into what we think, feel, and want. Collectively, their work has produced insights that cast an analytical—and helpful—light on the trials of our yearly quest to delight our families and friends.
Sure, it may run counter to the spirit of the holidays to think about gift-giving in such a cool and calculating manner. But by treating the holidays as a series of solvable problems—rather than by holding ourselves to an impossible ideal—we can, perhaps, get better at it. So this holiday season, give yourself a break: Use the advice inside to treat gift-giving not as an art, but as a science.
How to square this with the happiness research? What Van Boven has done in his own life, he said, is spend the big money on experiences—say, a ski vacation—and supplement them with related material objects, like hand warmers. That way, recipients have a thing to open in addition to an activity to anticipate.
Alison Gopnik, a developmental psychologist at University of California at Berkeley and the author of "The Philosophical Baby," has found that when it comes to young children especially, the most important property to look for in a gift is that it lends itself to pretend-play. Such gifts,
Gopnik said, develop children's ability to engage in counter-factual thinking—to imagine "ways the world could be other than the way it is."
Blocks and dolls are good in this respect, according to Gopnik, while some toys that are explicitly designed to be educational—a talking microscope, for instance, that recites facts—are not. "One of the best presents my son ever got was from his wonderful grandmother," Gopnik said. "She made dress-up clothes: a whole box full of capes and different kinds of trousers and wands and sparkly crowns. And it was a very inexpensive present, but it was a fantastic source of
pretend-play."
A good gift doesn't even have to be that labor intensive. In fact, according to Gopnik, one of the best things you can do when you give a kid a gift is not throw away the box it came in. "Boxes end up being a fantastic toy," she said. "You can turn it into a boat, you can turn it into a house, you can ride in it—there's very good play value in a cardboard box."
DON’T SHOP ALL AT ONCE
"To fight momentum," Dhar said, "separate it out." One smart way to do this, he added, is to divide up your list based on the sorts of people you're buying gifts for, and how much you want to spend on them. In other words, don't buy gifts for your acquaintances at work right after you've bought a bunch of expensive presents for your immediate family—your frame of reference will be thrown off and you'll wind up spending more than is reasonable. "You end up overspending because the amounts look relatively small compared to the other gifts that you're buying for people. Suddenly, it seems OK to spend $50."
One way to interpret this finding is that it's always worth doing the work of explaining your motivations and reasoning after you've made landfall: If the present is a failure, you'll get points for effort, and if it's a triumph, you'll be appreciated all the more by drawing the recipient's attention away from the innate quality of the gift and reminding them of how much care you put into choosing it.
Leider studies favor-trading in social networks, with special attention paid to the dynamics between people who feel indebted to one another. Leider has found that one reliable way to get better and more valuable presents from others is to deliberately give presents to people with whom we share a lot of friends. The more "dense" the social connection between two individuals, Leider said, the more obligated they feel to do right by each other by reciprocating. "The consequences if you don't return a favor are bigger the more friends we have in common," he said.
Thinking about gift-giving so strategically will no doubt strike many as repugnant. But regardless of what we may want to believe about the transformative power of the holidays, the fact is that human nature doesn't go away just because we're trying to be extra nice to one another. Giving gifts, in this context, is a delicate and predictable dance. We might as well know the right steps.
Leon Neyfakh is the staff writer for Ideas. E-mail lneyfakh@globe.com.