The psychology of giving

Giving a gift isn’t just about a material transfer. There are also measurable social and neurological benefits. Gifts “reinforce bonds and relationships between people,” says Dr Mark Williams, Professor of Cognitive Neuroscience at Macquarie University.

According to Mark, people have been giving gifts to connect with one another throughout most of human history. “Back when people were in small tribal groups, women traditionally would have given fruits and nuts to men, and men would have given meat to women. They would [also] give gifts to tribes they wanted to have relationships with. That’s how it all evolved.”

The effect is also chemical. One study from the University of Zurich discovered even making a plan to spend money on another person enhances activity in the areas of the brain that link altruism and happiness. According to Mark, we get a release of dopamine when giving and receiving gifts – which means gift-giving creates pleasure. “That dopamine interacts with our memory centres,” he adds. A good gift can reinforce a positive impression of the giver, creating a stronger bond in the long run.

Gift-giving isn’t always a straightforward, happy exchange, though. What if you give a bad one?

“There’s always the negative side,” says Mark. “We have a lot of anxiety around giving gifts, because it is such an important aspect of having an ‘in-group’,” – a close community of people with shared interests and values.

For the gift giver, the stakes are usually high. And much of the time, we get it wrong. As American psychologist Barry Schwartz pointed out in his 1967 article ‘The social psychology of the gift’, the presents we give “reveal an important secret: the idea which the recipient evokes in the imagination of the giver.”

According to Viren Swami, Professor of Social Psychology at Anglia Ruskin University, there are two sides to the gift-giving paradigm. One is ‘recipient-centric’, “where you try to find a gift that reflects the qualities or interests of the person receiving the gift.” he writes in The Conversation (an online journal written by academics and researchers). And the other is ‘giver-centric’, “where you are focused on giving something that reflects [your] own personality or discloses something about you as an individual.”

“But which option is better?” Viren ponders. Surprisingly, giver-centric gifts tend to be preferred by receivers. “Rather than trying to prove how much you know a person by buying something you think they will like, there’s greater meaning in giving gifts that reflect your own personality or likes,” he concludes.

Giving money as a gift tends to raise eyebrows, but it isn’t necessarily a bad choice. Some research suggests that gift givers underestimate how much the receiver might value money, believing it’s impersonal or insensitive. But according to Viren, money is generally valued about the same as an unrequested gift.

Is it worth the risk? Mark suggests that people value money in different ways – that is, relative to our standards of living, our financial expectations, and so on. “In giving money, you’re assuming that the other person values that money as much as you [do] – which may not be true,” he says. Instead of hard currency, there’s always the time-honoured gift voucher.

Not all presents need to come wrapped. As one Cornell University study concludes: “Experiential purchases provide greater satisfaction and happiness because [they] enhance social relations, form a bigger part of a person’s identity, and evoke fewer social comparisons than material purchases.”

Mark agrees that giving someone your time – or the chance to create a memory – is a more valuable present than an item they won’t use or something that cost you too much. “People appreciate it much more if you give a gift that is well thought out and meaningful to them and you, rather than just giving them something that costs a lot of money,” says Mark.

According to Mark, most of the time the only way to know whether a gift is successful or not is to “take it on face value.” But this can be problematic: “Because social groups are so important to us, we’ve spent hundreds of thousands of years evolving ways of faking it. It’s really hard to tell if someone likes a gift.”

Of course, there is one clear path around this problem. Research suggests that people prefer gifts they’ve requested over gifts they’re surprised by. This truth has been addressed in wedding culture, when gifts are requested through a registry, and more and more online ‘wishlist’ services are starting to pop up to help people get what they want – and make sure that fewer presents go to waste.

Of course, when all else fails, you can try the good old-fashioned method to make sure your gift receiver gets their dopamine hit: simply ask them what they want.