Research

Existing research documents many giver-recipient asymmetries, but most work assumes that the recipient is also the primary beneficiary of the gift. We examine situations in which gifts benefit a recipient's close relationships — such as a child or a pet. Building on research on gift-giving and the extended self, we propose that recipients value such gifts more than givers anticipate.

Recipients view gifts directed toward important dependents as signals that the giver understands what matters in their lives, whereas givers rely on an implicit norm that gifts should directly benefit the named recipient. Across four studies, we find consistent evidence for this asymmetry, replicated across occasions (Christmas, birthday). This work identifies a previously unexplored source of giver-recipient disagreement and offers practical implications for retailers and gifting platforms seeking to improve gift recommendations.

Generally speaking, expensive gifts are more likely than inexpensive gifts to impress recipients, all else equal. However, what if the giver is known to be a spendthrift (someone who experiences little distress when spending money)? We propose that spendthrifts are likely to have difficulty impressing recipients with expensive gifts, given that purchasing such gifts does not require much of a psychological sacrifice. By contrast, tightwads (who experience greater distress when spending money) may have an easier time impressing recipients with expensive gifts. Indeed, in the context of close relationships, we find that an expensive gift from a tightwad is viewed as requiring greater psychological sacrifice than the same gift from a spendthrift. Recipients are also more willing to reciprocate expensive gifts from tightwads than identical gifts from spendthrifts. These effects are driven by perceived psychological sacrifice rather than inferences about the giver's financial resources and disappear when the gift is inexpensive.

Consumers often infer that products packaged in paper are healthier than identical products packaged in plastic, because they associate paper with naturalness. We examine whether interventional labeling can attenuate this bias. We find that concrete, attribute-specific claims (e.g., "no preservatives" or "no artificial ingredients") reduce this healthiness bias substantially more than general naturalness claims, because they directly target the inferential associations underlying consumers' naturalness heuristic. This work contributes to research on corrective labeling by demonstrating that the effectiveness of corrective information depends not only on what is communicated, but also on how specifically it is communicated.