The Gifts That Keep On Being Given

Marc Herman examines research on “re-gifting”:

[Researchers at Harvard and Stanford] focused a series of studies on “re-gifting,” or passing gifts you have received but don’t want, on to people to whom you should give a gift but can’t seem to think of anything for. Curiously, the study found that re-gifting bothered the people doing it more than it did the people who had provided the troublesome gift in the first place. “Givers believed that the act of gift-giving passed title to the gift on to receivers, such that receivers were free to decide what to do with the gift,” they wrote. “In contrast, receivers believed that givers retained some say in how their gifts were used.” …

The research focused much of its attention on “entitlement,” specifically the sense that one has control, to greater and lesser extents, over the gift. This in turn appeared to be a function of intimacy both between the gifter and giftee, and the implied intimacy of the gift itself. The researchers, who appear to be really fun people, picked various hypothetical gifts, including good ones—an iPod shuffle!—and not-so-good ones, like “Mandy Moore DVDs.” (Question: What if the iPod had Mandy Moore songs on it? This was not explored.) A big discovery revealed that re-gifting changes significantly if the gift is crafty. The sweater with a duck on it that your mom knitted for you? You’re keeping that, sorry.