This article looks at the trade-offs that gift givers and gift receivers make between desirability and feasibility using construal level theory as a framework. Focusing on the asymmetric distance from a gift that exists within giver-receiver dyads, the authors propose that, unlike receivers, givers construe gifts abstractly and therefore weight desirability attributes more than feasibility attributes. Support for this proposition emerges in studies examining giver and receiver mind-sets, as well as giver and receiver evaluations of gifts. Furthermore, givers do not choose gifts that maximize receiver happiness or other relationship goals even though givers believe they are doing so. Finally, the authors demonstrate that while givers are sensitive to their distance from the receiver, receivers are not sensitive to this distance.
We recruited 425 US-based participants from Amazon.com’s Mechanical Turk. However, 365 were left after removing those who clicked to enter but did not finish the study, failed the IMC, or incorrectly answered whether they were in the giver or receiver condition. Participants were divided into a 2 (participant role: giver vs. receiver) X 2 (perspective: control vs. own preference) between-subjects design. First, participants imagined a specific friend and wrote down that friend’s initials. Then they imagined either giving that friend a gift or receiving a gift from that friend for a birthday occasion. Each participant was asked to imagine a choice between a highly feasible gift (a photo-editing program with few features that was easy to use) and a highly desirable gift (a high-quality photo-editing program that was hard to learn) and to give their relative preference on a 1–7 bipolar scale anchored at “prefer Gift A” and “prefer Gift B,” where Gift B was the high-desirability option. Right before answering, half of the participants were asked to take a moment to think about which software they would prefer for themselves.
