‘Tis the season of giving. ‘Tis also the season of returning.
American consumers are projected to spend roughly $960 billion this holiday season, according to the National Retail Federation. But retailers expect returns to account for almost 20 percent of those sales.
That return frenzy arises, at least in part, because people tend to make a lot of mistakes when giving presents, says Julian Givi, a marketing expert and psychologist who has been studying gifting practices, and when they go awry, for roughly a decade.
When Givi went into this line of research, he assumed that gift givers were simply motivated by a desire to please recipients. Not so much, he quickly discovered. Instead, people often give gifts that satisfy their own desires — for uniqueness, societal approval or as a gag — rather than the desires of recipients, says Givi, of West Virginia University in Morgantown.
In other words, people would be a whole lot better at giving gifts if they could just get their own egos out of the way. Givi and colleagues reviewed research into all things gift giving in the July Journal of Consumer Psychology.
Giving good gifts may not seem like a research-worthy topic. But positive gift exchanges can help businesses struggling to deal with the sheer volume of returns, as well as cement social relationships. Perhaps most importantly, giving better gifts could take pressure off the environment. By one estimate, in 2020, some 2.6 million tons of returned products in the United States wound up in a landfill.
Science News spoke to Givi about research on gift giving — and how that translates to advice to help last-minute shoppers avoid common gifting pitfalls this holiday season. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
SN: Your review touches on the many ways that gift givers go astray due to social norms. Can you provide some examples?
Givi: There’s probably hundreds of norms in gift giving. Generally,…
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