Why don't we give each other cash for Christmas? Your employer pays you cash instead of grocery carts full of stuff because you know what you want better than they do; why doesn't that go for gifts as well?
One of my relatives does consistently give cash (and only cash) to me and at least one other family member on Christmas, though we don't do the same in reverse. In my experience this works out well for all people involved.
Note that even when people give out a wish-list, it tends to be an actual list, and not just a single item that they want from each person. (I recall a South Park episode where Cartman requests a specific gift from each friend, in order to avoid the duplicate gift phenomenon, but of course this just reinforces Cartman's image as very crass.) I agree with jimrandomh's point that a gift retains an association with the giver in many cases, but I'd also want to stress that this is a two-way phenomenon. The recipient is more likely to think about the giver when using or seeing or thinking about the gift, but the giver is also more likely to think about her connection to the recipient on seeing the recipient using the gift. This feeling of connection is strengthened when the giver specifically chooses the gift. Presumably, the effect is strongest if the giver chose the gift from the universe of all possible gifts, but I suspect that it's still pretty strong even if there were only two permissible choices. If I were to choose between a stylish sweater and an iPod for a friend, then I would at least be reminded of my role in my friend's life each time I see her with either the sweater or iPod, and she would be reminded of my role in her life each time she uses one or the other. However, if she had just told me to buy the sweater, or told me to buy the iPod, this would deny me any agency in her life (at least with respect to this one salient choice), and (provided our relationship is a good one) thinking about my agency in her life is a benefit for both of us.
I was going to say: I wonder if the role of specific gifts is "forcing fun" - but I see Lewis Powell has preempted me. Perhaps it might be even better stated as "denying a humdrum use". Nobody wants their present to be spent paying the gas bill.
One interesting phenomenon in my experience that supports this: when someone has a big personal goal in mind they often do ask for money - and get it.
One possibility is that prudence/practicality constrains the ways in which people consider it appropriate to spend money on oneself. If you are of modest means, you are judged harshly for purchasing an iPod instead of saving money or paying your credit card bills, etc.
This applies to spending money received as a gift, because money is fungible.
However, someone of modest means isn't judged harshly simply for possessing an iPod, they are judged harshly for spending money on an iPod. The institution of gift-giving (including the social pressure not to give money, and the acceptability of drawing up wish-lists) provide a way for someone of modest means to acquire the iPod (or whatever) without being subject to harsh judgment for purchasing it. You can't put "paying down my credit card debt" on your wish-list, and even if you did, people would feel social pressure not to give you money or pay your credit card debt for you.
I think that this can go a long way towards explaining the phenomenon of christmas lists or birthday lists, but does not do as much for wedding/baby registries. I guess Eliezer's suggestion about the affective features of a gift (over money) sounded pretty good, so maybe that can be part of the explanation too.
You know, people have actually thought the this before, and deeply, but unfortunately the bias of the field of economics -- that completely unsupported supposition that people are rational, individualistic maximizers of simplistic utility measures -- makes this work invisible. If you want to understand how people actually behave, you need to go to a field that studies actual humans. For instance, see Marcel Mauss's seminal anthropological study, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies or Lewis Hyde's reintpretation and popularization of the same ideas.
The giver and the receiver's motives aren't the same:The giver is the one who wants to signal closeness to other person (this is all they can hope for).The receiver has other signaling to consider:1. the item given has signaling potential in other relationships.2. friends pretending to be closer than they are to you isn't as much of a concern to most people as far as I can tell, more important is whether other people are understanding the signals they're trying to send.
-> Better to get the items you want and signal with it in the relationships that matter most to you already than to test the strength of all your friendships/acquaintances. e.g. Would prefer to have book that will look good on their shelf than to have accurate information that Emily doesn't know their taste in books.So they thwart the giver's attempts to signal by giving them instructions, which the giver then has an excuse to follow (this isn't necessarily bad for the giver - they may have only wanted to signal because it would have been embarrassing not to when they could, but to be prevented is easier).
Lots of variables at work. I'm old enough to remember an aunt giving me hand knitted mittens or socks, which I had to lie and say I liked in my mandatory thank you notes, while other aunts/uncles might give a couple crisp $1 bills (yes, that old). Meanwhile my mother might give her siblings home-canned chicken. (Yes, money was tight.) So one assumption likely is: we're in the money economy and the exchanges and wish lists are for bought presents, commercial products. And both giver and receiver are essentially equal.
In part, it's an information problem--how well do giver and giftee know each other, their desires and needs, how much do they value efficiency in exchanges, how secure or insecure in the relationship are they, how much contact do they have during the year. etc. It's also a risk problem, giving and receiving presents can be risky. My posting a wish list is itself a gift to potential givers with limited time, limited imagination, etc., saying I understand their anxieties and concerns and I won't ask them to know me better than I know myself. (Or maybe, it's also distancing--I don't want the risk of receiving a present that's incongruous with my self image.
I've answered this question before, Robin_Hanson: Part of the benefit of a gift is to give something the recipient *didn't realize* they would benefit from in the first place. For that reason, it's impossible to write a wishlist for it. When people are too lazy to find out this "perfect gift", they just ask the recipient what they want.
Okay, so my pet theory does not work for predicting wedding gifts vs. money -- it's not clear (to me) that buying the gifts oneself shows more adjustment to needs than giving money. It could, through extra time spent and perhaps being responsible for specific gifts on the list, but that argument doesn't seem enough to confidently say that's what's going on.
I am not sure that the bridal/baby registry serves the same function as the holiday/birthday gift list. I wonder if the resemblance is merely superficial.
As anyone who has been marshalled for the wedding/baby shower gift can tell you, these are much more impersonal and the lists are quite regular and uniform each time. Usually only the silverware pattern and crib sheet colors differ.
The community as a whole is making a statement with the wedding/baby situation in a way it does not with the other two, and the community element is of prime importance.
At work we regularly pony up for wedding/baby, but never for holiday/birthday. We the community are stating our involvement in happy independent starter families as a social good - so it is appropriate for your job & colleagues to invest in this, even when they scarcely know you.
So I am wondering if wedding/baby is truly comparable? The signal seems different. But I am not a social scientist.
There is a much simpler explanation. Giving a gift creates an association between the object given and the person who gave it. This makes friends and acquaintances harder to forget about, since using or seeing that object years later may bring back memories of the person who gave it. There is direct evidence for this in the fact that people sometimes refer to objects by source: "the sweater that [name] gave me". That increases the expected number of times that the gift-receiver will think about the gift-giver, and thereby increases the probability that they will remain friends. Money doesn't work for this purpose, because once it's been spent, there is no longer an object around to trigger those memories.
Matt: I think in that case you should just buy a video game which is either very popular (so as to increase the change the recipient will find it 'popular', if you follow), or which has been well-appraised critically (in which case, you're saying mere popularity or sales may be misleading and enjoyability tracks better with critical acclaim).
Unit: I don't think command-and-control explains much at all. Suppose I give a loved one a wishlist, and they end up giving me a gift not on the wishlist, but which I wind up finding much more pleasing than I predicted any of the wishlist items were. Am I really going to deduct points for not obeying my orders? No, I'm going to give them major props for either knowing my preferences better than I apparently do, or knowing more about an area than I (much the same thing, if you think of it as them giving me 'what I really wanted').
Poll: Are gift cards an acceptable compromise between choosing a gift and giving money?
I give a weasely answer to my own poll. Only if the choice of gift card indicates knowledge of the recipient. The more specific, the better. Gift card for Sears < gift card for a bookstore < gift card for a store catering to your hobby.
One of my relatives does consistently give cash (and only cash) to me and at least one other family member on Christmas, though we don't do the same in reverse. In my experience this works out well for all people involved.
Note that even when people give out a wish-list, it tends to be an actual list, and not just a single item that they want from each person. (I recall a South Park episode where Cartman requests a specific gift from each friend, in order to avoid the duplicate gift phenomenon, but of course this just reinforces Cartman's image as very crass.) I agree with jimrandomh's point that a gift retains an association with the giver in many cases, but I'd also want to stress that this is a two-way phenomenon. The recipient is more likely to think about the giver when using or seeing or thinking about the gift, but the giver is also more likely to think about her connection to the recipient on seeing the recipient using the gift. This feeling of connection is strengthened when the giver specifically chooses the gift. Presumably, the effect is strongest if the giver chose the gift from the universe of all possible gifts, but I suspect that it's still pretty strong even if there were only two permissible choices. If I were to choose between a stylish sweater and an iPod for a friend, then I would at least be reminded of my role in my friend's life each time I see her with either the sweater or iPod, and she would be reminded of my role in her life each time she uses one or the other. However, if she had just told me to buy the sweater, or told me to buy the iPod, this would deny me any agency in her life (at least with respect to this one salient choice), and (provided our relationship is a good one) thinking about my agency in her life is a benefit for both of us.
I was going to say: I wonder if the role of specific gifts is "forcing fun" - but I see Lewis Powell has preempted me. Perhaps it might be even better stated as "denying a humdrum use". Nobody wants their present to be spent paying the gas bill.
One interesting phenomenon in my experience that supports this: when someone has a big personal goal in mind they often do ask for money - and get it.
One possibility is that prudence/practicality constrains the ways in which people consider it appropriate to spend money on oneself. If you are of modest means, you are judged harshly for purchasing an iPod instead of saving money or paying your credit card bills, etc.
This applies to spending money received as a gift, because money is fungible.
However, someone of modest means isn't judged harshly simply for possessing an iPod, they are judged harshly for spending money on an iPod. The institution of gift-giving (including the social pressure not to give money, and the acceptability of drawing up wish-lists) provide a way for someone of modest means to acquire the iPod (or whatever) without being subject to harsh judgment for purchasing it. You can't put "paying down my credit card debt" on your wish-list, and even if you did, people would feel social pressure not to give you money or pay your credit card debt for you.
I think that this can go a long way towards explaining the phenomenon of christmas lists or birthday lists, but does not do as much for wedding/baby registries. I guess Eliezer's suggestion about the affective features of a gift (over money) sounded pretty good, so maybe that can be part of the explanation too.
You know, people have actually thought the this before, and deeply, but unfortunately the bias of the field of economics -- that completely unsupported supposition that people are rational, individualistic maximizers of simplistic utility measures -- makes this work invisible. If you want to understand how people actually behave, you need to go to a field that studies actual humans. For instance, see Marcel Mauss's seminal anthropological study, The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies or Lewis Hyde's reintpretation and popularization of the same ideas.
The giver and the receiver's motives aren't the same:The giver is the one who wants to signal closeness to other person (this is all they can hope for).The receiver has other signaling to consider:1. the item given has signaling potential in other relationships.2. friends pretending to be closer than they are to you isn't as much of a concern to most people as far as I can tell, more important is whether other people are understanding the signals they're trying to send.
-> Better to get the items you want and signal with it in the relationships that matter most to you already than to test the strength of all your friendships/acquaintances. e.g. Would prefer to have book that will look good on their shelf than to have accurate information that Emily doesn't know their taste in books.So they thwart the giver's attempts to signal by giving them instructions, which the giver then has an excuse to follow (this isn't necessarily bad for the giver - they may have only wanted to signal because it would have been embarrassing not to when they could, but to be prevented is easier).
Lots of variables at work. I'm old enough to remember an aunt giving me hand knitted mittens or socks, which I had to lie and say I liked in my mandatory thank you notes, while other aunts/uncles might give a couple crisp $1 bills (yes, that old). Meanwhile my mother might give her siblings home-canned chicken. (Yes, money was tight.) So one assumption likely is: we're in the money economy and the exchanges and wish lists are for bought presents, commercial products. And both giver and receiver are essentially equal.
In part, it's an information problem--how well do giver and giftee know each other, their desires and needs, how much do they value efficiency in exchanges, how secure or insecure in the relationship are they, how much contact do they have during the year. etc. It's also a risk problem, giving and receiving presents can be risky. My posting a wish list is itself a gift to potential givers with limited time, limited imagination, etc., saying I understand their anxieties and concerns and I won't ask them to know me better than I know myself. (Or maybe, it's also distancing--I don't want the risk of receiving a present that's incongruous with my self image.
I've answered this question before, Robin_Hanson: Part of the benefit of a gift is to give something the recipient *didn't realize* they would benefit from in the first place. For that reason, it's impossible to write a wishlist for it. When people are too lazy to find out this "perfect gift", they just ask the recipient what they want.
Okay, so my pet theory does not work for predicting wedding gifts vs. money -- it's not clear (to me) that buying the gifts oneself shows more adjustment to needs than giving money. It could, through extra time spent and perhaps being responsible for specific gifts on the list, but that argument doesn't seem enough to confidently say that's what's going on.
Warrigal's answer explains why nothing > giving cash, but it doesn't explain why giving gifts > nothing.
Whenever giving cash for christmas comes up, I always think of this scene from Donnie Brasco:
http://www.youtube.com/watc...
I am not sure that the bridal/baby registry serves the same function as the holiday/birthday gift list. I wonder if the resemblance is merely superficial.
As anyone who has been marshalled for the wedding/baby shower gift can tell you, these are much more impersonal and the lists are quite regular and uniform each time. Usually only the silverware pattern and crib sheet colors differ.
The community as a whole is making a statement with the wedding/baby situation in a way it does not with the other two, and the community element is of prime importance.
At work we regularly pony up for wedding/baby, but never for holiday/birthday. We the community are stating our involvement in happy independent starter families as a social good - so it is appropriate for your job & colleagues to invest in this, even when they scarcely know you.
So I am wondering if wedding/baby is truly comparable? The signal seems different. But I am not a social scientist.
There is a much simpler explanation. Giving a gift creates an association between the object given and the person who gave it. This makes friends and acquaintances harder to forget about, since using or seeing that object years later may bring back memories of the person who gave it. There is direct evidence for this in the fact that people sometimes refer to objects by source: "the sweater that [name] gave me". That increases the expected number of times that the gift-receiver will think about the gift-giver, and thereby increases the probability that they will remain friends. Money doesn't work for this purpose, because once it's been spent, there is no longer an object around to trigger those memories.
Matt: I think in that case you should just buy a video game which is either very popular (so as to increase the change the recipient will find it 'popular', if you follow), or which has been well-appraised critically (in which case, you're saying mere popularity or sales may be misleading and enjoyability tracks better with critical acclaim).
Unit: I don't think command-and-control explains much at all. Suppose I give a loved one a wishlist, and they end up giving me a gift not on the wishlist, but which I wind up finding much more pleasing than I predicted any of the wishlist items were. Am I really going to deduct points for not obeying my orders? No, I'm going to give them major props for either knowing my preferences better than I apparently do, or knowing more about an area than I (much the same thing, if you think of it as them giving me 'what I really wanted').
I added to the post saying weddings are a clearer example of the puzzle. There the list is very specific, kids aren't relevant.
The trouble with the extravagance theory is why we are excused more for putting extravagant items on a list vs. buying them ourselves.
The trouble with the signaling time theory is that most of us have many ways to substitute time for money and vice versa.
The trouble with the vivid show theory is why we don't just give some cheap vivid balloons or noise makers.
Unit, your command test theory seems odd, but at least it roughly fits.
Poll: Are gift cards an acceptable compromise between choosing a gift and giving money?
I give a weasely answer to my own poll. Only if the choice of gift card indicates knowledge of the recipient. The more specific, the better. Gift card for Sears < gift card for a bookstore < gift card for a store catering to your hobby.