Researchers explain the science behind bad gift giving
Last Updated: Wednesday, December 6, 2006 | 4:48 PM ET
CBC News
The unneeded blender, the detested sweater, the loathed golf clubs that are stuffed in the back of every closet are bad gifts from loved ones that spectacularly failed to hit the mark.
But new research indicates there's a sound reason why consumers buy the wrong presents for the people they love most. Researchers Davy Lerouge and Luk Warlop suggest, in an article published in the December issue of the Journal of Consumer Research, that we often feel overconfident when buying for loved ones.
Shoppers also often mistakenly assume their tastes are the same as the gift recipient's.
"Research on product attitude predictions suggests, and this research confirms, that familiarity with another consumer is not particularly helpful when predicting the other’s product attitudes," the authors wrote in their study.
Lerouge and Warlop surveyed couples who had been dating for more than six months, asking them individually to select bedroom furniture they thought would appeal to their partner.
The researchers found that people tended to ignore cues about what their partner may like and go with their preconceived notions instead.
"Our results suggest that familiarity caused [people] to put an overly heavy weight on pre-stored information," the authors wrote. "The pre-stored information that people possess about their partner is extensive. This elaborate knowledge makes predictors overly confident, such that they do not even attend to product-specific attitude feedback."
Researchers also gave participants information about a stranger's attitudes and preferences. Participants were more likely to choose accurately for the strangers than their loved ones, the study found.
"People predicting the attitudes of an unfamiliar target can rely only on general and stereotypical information about the stranger, which may be quite diagnostic," the authors wrote. "When predicting familiar targets, they are likely to ignore this valid information.
"Instead, they use more specific target information that is often found to be invalid or irrelevant when predicting product attitudes."
Lerouge is a lecturer in the faculty of economics and business administration at Tilburg University in the Netherlands and Warlop is an economics professor at Belgium's Katholieke University.
