What’s Good About Giving Bad Gift

Image by Jill Clardy via Flickr

This came out on Christmas Day, so it’s a little late, but…

Here’s my latest column on Money & Your Mind over at SmartMoney.com. Wonder what the use of giving presents is? Wonder how your bad present may reverberate?:

But are presents really as much of a waste as the poindexters would have us believe? Or do they play a slightly more complicated role in the emotional economy that can’t necessarily be measured in dollars?

A recent study of how men and women react to gifts gives us at least a few hints about one of the ways we use presents: as a form of social theater to figure out who does and doesn’t “get” us. So, as you unwrap your presents this Christmas, perhaps with a new significant other, here’s hoping you haven’t stepped into trouble.

In a study published in the journal Social Cognition in 2008, psychologists looked at the differences between how men and women react to bad gifts — both given by a stranger and by a romantic partner. Bad gifts are particularly interesting because of the threat they might pose to a relationship. More interesting: It turned out in the study that it was actually men who were much more sensitive to bad gifts than women, and they were much more likely to take a bad gift as a signal that maybe the relationship in question wasn’t going anywhere.

Gifts, as the authors point out, are viewed in the social psychology literature as “markers of similarity in tastes and interests” between relationship partners. And similarity — at least perceived similarity — has been found to reliably predict relationship satisfaction. In fact, it’s been found that an inflated sense of similarity is the keystone upon which happy relationships are built. (Harsh reality is no friend of love.)

What’s more, this idea of similarity being linked to compatibility and love is deeply ingrained in our culture. We’ve all seen the romantic trope of a young couple falling in love over a connection to the same band or the couple who meets in a café over reading the same book. Opposites may attract, but similarity bonds us.

Read on for why women rationalize bad presents and men take them at face value.