The psychology of regifting your gifts you get for Christmas – Wall Street Journal

Christmas is the time of excess and many of us are starting to feel profound guilt about how wasteful our consumer-driven society is. It is also the time when we all want to be generous and buy gifts for the people we care for. But not all the gifts we buy or receive may be appreciated. Who does not have an ugly jumper or tie from a granny, those extra socks that you will never wear, bottles of sweet wine that will never touch your lips and those gift sets with bath bubbles and shower gels that you will never use, stashed away in your cupboard. So, is it okay to regift the goodies that you received over Christmas? Many of us feel too guilty to give somebody else a gift that was chosen with care for us, but it may have become more acceptable in an era where recycling or upcycling has become the trend. I posed this question to a group of millennials and they all thought regifting was fine. If you do regift, you should probably be careful in not giving the gift to somebody who presented it to you and if it is something really special and chosen with care; it is probably not acceptable to regift. According to this article in the Wall Street Journal, the original giver may not be as offended as you thought they may be. – Linda van Tilburg.The case for regifting: Many think the move is shameful — but research suggests the problem is all in the regifter's head.___STEADY_PAYWALL___.By Gabrielle Adams and Michael Norton.(Wall Street Journal) – Despite its pleasures, gift giving can be problematic.A recipient wants items A and B (say, a hat and gloves) yet receives items C and D (say, a scarf and mittens). Another recipient wants C and D, yet receives A and B. The solution seems simple: The two recipients can simply pass along the gifts they received to each other.The psychology, however, is more complex. People in a study published in the Journal of Consumer Behaviour, for instance, used such words as guilty, lazy, thoughtless and disrespectful in describing their feelings about regifting. Popular culture casts it as taboo, as well. An entire episode of "Seinfeld" highlights the stigma attached to giving away presents meant for ourselves.Getting stuck with gifts we do not want is no small problem. Consider that the National Retail Federation calculated that the average holiday-season shopper in the US last year spent more than $1,000 on gifts. In a survey across 14 countries in Europe, meanwhile, 1 in 7 said they were unhappy with what they received for Christmas, yet more than half simply kept the gifts. . Regifting on 'Seinfeld"Why can't more gifts be passed along to people who appreciate them?Our research with Francis J. Flynn, a professor of organizational behavior at Stanford University's Graduate School of Business, suggests the shame associated with regifting is largely unwarranted. Indeed, our research consistently tells us that people overestimate the negative consequences.'It's your gift, do what you want with it'.We conducted a study in which we asked people to imagine themselves either as a "giver", who gives someone a gift card and later learns it had been regifted; or as a "regifter", one who receives the gift and gives it to someone else. The latter group saw more offense. Regifters tended to assume the original givers would be hurt when they found out. The general attitude of the original givers, however, was: "It's your gift, do what you want with it.".Next, we tried to shed light on just how serious the perceived offense is. We asked two groups — again, givers and regifters — to compare regifting a hypothetical wristwatch with throwing it in the trash. For the original givers, regifting the watch was a much less offensive act than trashing it. The regifters, however, wrongly assumed that the givers would find both equally offensive. The results were the same when regifting presents that the recipients didn't like much..Finally, given that the feared offense looks more imagined than real, we turned our attention to how people might be encouraged to break this taboo..For this part of our research, we invited to our lab at Stanford people who had recently received presents, and divided the people into two groups. When we gave the first group an opportunity to regift that present, 9% did so..When we gave the second group the same opportunity, we added that it was "National Regifting Day," a real event that happens each year on the Thursday before Christmas. It wasn't really National Regifting Day, but the group didn't know that: 30% of them agreed to regift..Everyone has received bad gifts in their lives, and we generally accept that we will receive more in the future. Yet for some (mathematically impossible) reason, we believe that we give only good gifts..Our research offers a simple solution to the problem of unwanted gifts. This holiday season, consider regifting, and encourage recipients of your gifts to do the same if what you gave them isn't quite what they hoped for..Dr. Adams is an assistant professor at the University of Virginia. Dr. Norton is a professor at Harvard Business School. Email them at reports@wsj.com.

The psychology of regifting your gifts you get for Christmas – Wall Street Journal

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