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It's that time of year again: the season of giving. With an onslaught of advertisements presenting us with endless gift options, how is that we decide whom on our lists get what? The saying goes that it's the thought that matters, but science has uncovered that there's more that goes into our gift giving decisions than may be readily apparent. Here are three surprising findings about how we decide what gifts we'll give — and to whom.
1. Gifts reflect the strength of the relationship between the gift-giver and the recipient. Take a study of gift giving among 50 graduate students in Norway at Christmastime. The findings revealed that participants invested more in gifts when the degree of relatedness was closer.
The researchers state that this finding lends support for kin selection theory, which maintains that blood relatives Kin selection is an evolutionary theory that proposes that people are more likely to help blood relatives because it increases the chances of passing down genes to future generations. There was an exception: Partners outranked all gift recipients. The authors state that this would be expected however, given that the participants were in their reproductive years.
2. Firstborn children spend more on average on gifts to relatives than laterborn children. Investigators interpret this finding drawing on work on birth order effects, in which first borns identify more strongly with parents, grandparents, and authority figures.
3. Women spend more on gifts for friends than do men. Studies show that women invest more in gifts for people in their extended social networks than men. What might explain this result? From an evolutionary perspective, this may be because of migrations from community to community. In such a circumstance, personal networks would have to be reconstructed time and again. One possibility that may account for this sex difference is that over evolutionary history, social systems may have been more patrilocal — meaning that wives settled with their husband's families. This would have required women to invest more heavily in distantly related people.
It might also be explained by alloparenting. In ancestral times, women's relationships with each other were more crucial in that they relied more heavily on each other for assistance with child care. The strength and importance of relationships for and between women in our ancient past may continue to be reflected in modern gift giving practices.
Category(s):Happiness
Source material from Psychology Today
