Is it better to give than receive?

Gift-giving is a common human tradition, especially around holidays and birthdays. But who benefits most: the giver, or the receiver? In this episode, Molly and Cristen examine what studies reveal about altruism, gifts and human psychology.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
It's ready. Are you welcome to Stump Mom Never Told You?
From House top works dot Com. Hello, and welcome to
the podcast. This is Molly and I'm Kristen. Kristen. This

(00:20):
is the podcast that's airing right before the very prominent
winter holiday Christmas. No disrespect to any other winter holidays,
because what we're about to talk about regards to any
holiday where major gift giving is involved. Yeah, and it
could even be you know, birthday or any day you'd
like to give, you know, christ And your birthday is

(00:41):
coming up on my birthday, yes, is two days away
from when we were recording this right now, so it's
your birthday. It's almost Christmas time, and uh, I just
want to know, you know, what did you get me
for Christmas? Let's ignore your birthday for for a while. Well, Molly, Um,
first of all, that is secret because Christmas is not

(01:02):
yet upon us. And if I were to tell you
what I got you, um, you know, I mean we're
recording this in um December first, not to not to
give away the podcast timeline, but it would be a
whole month that you know, what you got. I just now, no,
because I'm saving up the longer longer you can hold out. See,

(01:24):
I'm saving up the just the joy of being, of
giving you something, of being the giver and receiving the
intangible delight of that, just that look on your face
when you unwrap this present that I'm apparently giving you.
Um and you know, reaping the benefit of your joy. Yeah,

(01:45):
that leads us well into our our topic for the day,
because I think I kind of just answered it. I
think you did. But christ you haven't even told people
what the what the question you just answered is? I
know that was just me, um, dodging around this, dodging
around the ball because you didn't expect to find me
a Christmas present. Working with you every day is a present, Kristen. Um. No.
The question for the day is it better to give

(02:07):
than to receive? An age old phrase you'll often hear,
probably from your mother, Steph mother and mom never told
you and uh, you know, Kristen, in attempting to decide
step my demand for a present has has artfully gotten
into some of the issues that we're going to talk
about about. You know, do we give to see that
look on someone's face. Do we give because it's expected

(02:29):
of us? As I have now just put the ball
in Kristen's court? Um, why why do we give it all?
Why do we like giving? And you know in the
in the days before Christmas, don't you kind of just
want to say, shove it all like and you don't
want to go them all, you don't want to do
the wrapping. And it seems like the act of gift
giving sort of goes against human nature. I mean, we're

(02:50):
pretty selfish creatures when it comes right down to it.
So where did this whole gift giving thing come from? Because? Um,
there was an article about the spy taried Parker Pope
from the New York Times who points out that we
have been different cultures have been giving gifts in these
kind of ceremonial ways sort of the same way we

(03:11):
do around the holidays and with birthdays for thousands of years,
and she traces it back to um a custom called potlatch,
which is a whole community wide gift giving celebration where
households almost compete to give away the most possessions. Yeah,
if you end up poor by the end of a potlatch,

(03:32):
then you're going to be the most respected person after
the event, because the goal is just to give until
it hurts. And they're also evolutionary theories behind why we
would have this gift giving trait. I guess it's it's
so ingrained you could almost call it a trait um
the theory that men who are the most generous might
have the most reproductive success with women, and then women

(03:55):
who are the most skilled at giving such as extra
food or something some kind of clothing um, might be
the best at taking care of a family. So what
what she's saying is that maybe if a man was
watching a woman give her best friend a sweater, that
maybe subconsciously he's thinking, Oh, she's gonna be a good,
good mom. It's another way to demonstrate your value, your

(04:18):
productive fitness. So we talked about that with like engagement rings,
like the act of the man giving the ring sends
a signal to the community and Floman he's about to marry,
that he's making this investment in her, and it builds
that it's a tangible um representation of the social bond
between people. So we have this ingrained habit of giving gifts,

(04:42):
but at the same time, you know, we have to
spend money on a gift. We have to think about it.
We have to go out and get something unless you
are really crafty and you can make it yourself, or
if you're good at online shopping or which um. Whereas
if you just get the present. I mean, I'm looking
forward to my birthday in a couple of da this
is all I have to do is sit there and
have people throw presents in my face and I'll just

(05:03):
unwrap them. But what if you don't like them? Then
I take it back, put that cash in my pocket
and take myself to the arcade. Yeah, does not inspire
confidence in me as the potential gift giver to you
for your birthday. All right, But you know the thing is,
like you said, it's an expected thing. We do it.
It's it's ingrained in us. And uh, you know we
we value gift giving. Even if you get this gift

(05:25):
and you don't love it, you're still gonna be like, oh,
I respect this person. It's the thought that counts. It's
the thought that counts. And you know, we have this
impression as a society when you think again about these potlatches,
that gift giving and generosity is good. That someone who
wouldn't give a present? Is Scrooge McDuck right? That you know,
we we value gift giving, But the question is is

(05:47):
a better give to receive? Where is the value? Do
we value more the giving or the receiving. Now, if
you were to ask any any psychologists whether it's better
to give or receive, I'll bet you dollars donuts that
psychologist is gonna say, well, of course the giver reaps
the most benefits out of it emotionally, I mean, you know,

(06:09):
physical benefits the other person got the present. Yeah, let's
let's let's be honest. But there's all this work being
done on what happens to your brain, to your nervous system,
to your entire body when you give something, And as
it happens, there are quite quite a few physical effects
of giving that can perhaps lead to longer life, lead

(06:30):
to better health, um, and just make you happier overall. Yeah,
there's been a lot of research in recent years on
the science of happiness, and a lot of it does
come back to altruism and giving. For instance, there was
a study published in the journal Science in two thousand
eight that really studied how people responded. People at different

(06:50):
income levels responded to how they would then spend that money.
For instance, they got a pool of people and told
them that they we're going to get a company bonus
of anywhere from three thousand dollars to eight thousand dollars,
and then they went back and measured their happiness six
to eight weeks after getting the bonus, and also tracked

(07:11):
how they spent the money. And what the researchers found
was that regardless of whether you got the three thousand
dollar bonus or the maximum eight thousand dollar bonus, the
income didn't make a difference. It was overall, the people
who gave away the most, who spent the money on
more other people gave it to a charity, were the

(07:32):
happiest at the end of that six week period, right,
And so then they wanted to see, is it just
these large amounts of money, Uh, you know, the three thousand,
eight thousand dollar bonus, I'm sure a lot of people
sounds like something that would definitely increase happiness. Um. But
then they said, well, what if it's just you know,
between five and twenty dollars, Because they gave volunteers that
much money, and they said, you can spend this on yourself.

(07:52):
Or you can spend it on someone else. Now, Christen,
if someone hands you five dollars, would you go by
yourself a nice latte or did you buy me an latte?
It depends on if you're around and how much of
a caffeine boost I needed a time. That fair enough,
fair enough, But the researchers are saying that if you
bought me the latte, you'd be you'd be much happier.

(08:13):
And so it's from these small amounts of money, from
five dollars to up to eight thousand dollars. It's the gift.
It's not the acquisition of the money that makes the
people happy. It's the giving it away to others that
makes people happy. So they're saying, you know, if you
want to get that quick boost, five dollars to a
charity this time of year could could go a long way.
And I think that this quote from Michael Norton, who's

(08:33):
a professor at Harvard Business School who has uh delved
into a lot of these topics about money and happiness
and giving, sums it up well when he says, most
people would think that if you make more money, you're
gonna be a lot happier. Our results and a lot
of other people's results show that making more money does
make you a little bit happier, but it doesn't really
have a huge impact. Instead, our studies suggest that maybe

(08:54):
little changes in how you spend is what makes that difference,
which is kind of interesting think about. And you know,
giving to others does not have to be monetary. And
I'm going to talk now about something that was in
the Monitor on Psychology in two thousand three, and they
were reporting on a study that found that giving support
and assistance is just as important as giving money in

(09:15):
terms of making you happier and increasing your lifespan by
by years. And they were saying people who helped spouses
and friends and family and neighbors by doing things like
giving them rides, running errands, doing their shopping, helping with
housework or childcare, these people had physical effects on their
lifespan that the people who didn't help other people in

(09:37):
their lives didn't have, right, And this is from a
study where the researchers tracked around four older couples over
a five year period and they controlled for different health issues,
and those people who were doing those good deeds giving
of themselves in one way or another, were twice as
likely to survive over that five year period as the

(10:01):
people who weren't giving. Basically, um, they were leading healthier,
happier lives just by possibly by giving. I mean, there's
a little bit of correlation causation here, but research does
overall seem to say that giving is good for you.
So so far we've done giving to charity, giving of
services in your time. But as we pointed out, Christmas

(10:23):
Birthday is coming up, holidays are coming up, people are
starting to give rapped presents, and the question has to
become when you exchange a wrapped present, is it better
to give than to receive? And this is where we're
gonna turn to an interesting researcher named Joel Waldfogel now
Professor Waldfogel got a pretty bad reputation for himself. He's

(10:47):
a professor um of Economics at the Wharton School of
the University of Pennsylvania, and he really, he really rereffled
some feathers in when he published a paper entitled The
Deadweight Loss of Christmas, where he yeah, in which he
sized up how much people value items that they received

(11:12):
as gifts, and he concluded that of the value of
what someone was giving, was given, was completely destroyed just
by the process of choosing the wrong thing. And he
brings up in an example of like a red sweater
versus a blue sweater. You you know you you see
this nice sweater. You know that I'd like a sweater,

(11:32):
but you just go with the red instead of the blue.
I unwrapid I really hate the color red? Done right there? Destroyed.
I wasted my money the only chance of making up
that value as if it has any sentimental value to you. Yes,
whereas you know, if you had gone to the store
yourself and you bought the red sweater, even though you
really don't love the color red, but you're just out

(11:54):
you need an impulse by you bought it, what's vocal
saying You're still gonna like it better because you bought
it for yourself than because I bought it for you,
and it's exactly what I wanted. Yeah, because you because
you bought it yourself, even though red and blue. Again,
maybe you would have wanted the blue when you opened
the present, but when you when you got the red
for yourself, you're like a score and uh and wal

(12:16):
Foe studied this this phenomenon so extensively that he even
turned his research into a book called screw Genomics, Why
you Shouldn't buy presents for the Holidays, And we read
an interview with Waldfoe. Well this was taking place a
while after the book came out, and and they asked
whether or not um he gives his children presence around

(12:38):
the holidays, and he actually does. He's just a little
more hard headed about the whole thing. And he didn't
know that people may not want to give him presents
anymore because he's going to be looking at them being like, well,
I know she spent this much, but I have destroyed
of the value. There there goes the deadweight loss. But
it's kind of funny because after he gave the stripetation

(13:00):
is of being like the scrooge economist of the holidays. Uh,
he went back a while later and really looked at
that sentimental value add to presents that we give, and
he kind of come came around to this idea of
you know what, yeah, this the sentimental value can can
redeem some of that deadweight loss. And you know, I
think you can look at it from a purely utilitarian

(13:22):
point of view and that you know, yes, I spent
a lot of time Christen buying you that red sweater
that you don't love, and it may have some SENTI
value value. But what while Vocal is not trying to,
you know, deter me from giving you a president at all,
he just a wants me to think more carefully about it,
or be consider the fact that if I want my
gift to retain the most value, Let's say I've got
twenty five dollars to give you, and I want the

(13:43):
gift you worth twenty five dollars, what I really need
to do is give you cash or a gift card,
because that is the only gift that is going to
retain dollar for dollar that value. Because my dollar red
sweater only really was worth ten dollars to you. But
if I give you a twenty five a gift card
to a place that sells red sweaters, you're gonna be
able to maximize all twenty five dollars of that gift exactly.

(14:07):
Um And maybe that's why. According to the National Retail Federation,
gift cards are the most popular gift that Americans are
going to purchase this holiday season, and they project for
the two thousand ten holiday season, we're going to drop
an average of a hundred and forty five dollars and
sixty one cents on gift cards. And gift cards spending

(14:28):
is expected to reach almost twenty five billion dollars, and
I find that surprising. Even though Wallpogal recommends it, and
even though those numbers indicate that lots of people are
doing the gift card thing, I still think that people
have that kind of version to saying I wanted to
spend twenty five dollars on you. You know, it's the
same thing. Why you don't you know? I was My
mom always tell me, like, we're not giving a kid

(14:49):
cash on his birthday because it's so it's so tacky. Right, So,
while according to the National Retail Federation, the number one
reason people don't buy gift cards is because it does
seem to you impersonal and seems a little thoughtless, wald
focal is giving you the perfect counter argument. Is about
to say, hey, you know what, it's a recession. I'm

(15:09):
just maximizing my dollars for myself and for the recipient.
So so wald Focle really takes a look. I mean,
he's trying to make things equal for a giver and
a receiver. The giver is going to spend twenty five dollars,
the receiver's gonna get twenty five dollars worth the value
of it. But let's take away the money and go
back to what we were talking about earlier in terms

(15:30):
of just that warm glow feeling. I mean, if if
we take away the money from it, is it better?
I mean he's trying to make it equal better, equal
to give, equal to receive twenty five dollars worth of value,
can put a number on it, great, but taking away
that number and I just give you a present, you
receive it, you like it. Okay, who's coming out on
top here, Christen? Yeah, I see. Here's the thing with

(15:51):
this whole giving receiving and the whole question of whether
or not you know this means that, you know, maybe
humans can be completely selfless. Well, Economist seven answer for
that as well, and it's something called impure altruism or
warm glow altruism, And it's basically this idea that we
tend to give generously when we know that we are

(16:12):
going to receive back generously, whether it's just the the
adoration of someone you know, just thinking that you are
the most the kindest, most thoughtful person that they know,
or a tangible payback such as a tax to turn
from a charitable donation, or you know, if I know
that my birthat is coming up soon after Christen's, I'm

(16:33):
getting I'm getting her a good present, social felt pressure
to get me a good present exactly. So those researchers
are saying that there is no really pure good deed
that we're always giving because we've got an eye out
for number one. Is that right? Yeah? And the Freakonomics
blog on New York Times points out that with charitable giving,
Americans tend to be pretty generous, but we're especially generous

(16:57):
on December thirty one, which is the last day that
you can get those tax deductible donations out the door
and then reap the benefits in April. And also there
have been studies finding that um eBay items that are
marked for charity have a much better chance of selling
than items that don't. We do get this. We definitely

(17:19):
feed off of that idea of the warm glow altruism,
of of wanting to receive that um that warm and
fuzzy feeling back. And as long as we're gonna give,
we want we want happy fuzzies. Because they did so
so with all of this, even with the potential deadweight loss,
I would say only this all stacks up to a
confirmation that, yes, it is better to give than receive. Yeah,

(17:41):
And Will Fadell does point out that if we just
eliminated gift giving all together, he would prefer we do
cash and gift cards. But if we had to eliminate
all of all of those, it would have emotional repercussions
on relationships because we do thrive on that back and forth,
that acknowledgment of here's a person who is important to me.
I'm recognizing the fact that I find them important by

(18:03):
giving them this gift. Yeah, And it makes total sense
because we've been doing this for thousands of years. So
as you're wrapping, I hope someone out there is wrapping
presents as they listen to us. And maybe maybe you're
getting a little grumpy. Maybe I really hate when that
tape dispenser gets all all screwed up and you can't
get a nice piece of tape. If that's happening to you,
don't don't throw in the towel just yet. Just wait

(18:23):
for the warm glow. It's coming. Even though this season
is stressful, it's still better to go through all that
crap at the mall and uh and and reap the
emotional rewards both for yourself and your recipient. So in
the meantime we will have the gift of listener emails
to give to you. That's true, because you've given them

(18:48):
to us, we receive them and makes us happy now
we give them. I have one here from Melanie It's
about our Women in Scandinavia podcast, and she writes that
she lived in Sweden for two years and I have
the opportunity to travel and work all over Scandinavia. Here's
my observation about how friendly to women it is. As
you guys said, this all depends on how you quantify things.

(19:09):
If we're talking about possibilities and choices, the United States
comes out on top in my opinion. The high tax
is required to support the generous maternity. Paternity lead. An
extensive daycare system in Scandinavia drives the cost of everything up. Consequently,
in most Scandinavian families, both parents are forced to work
in order to sustain an average standard of a living.
There are no couples I knew in Scandinavia in which

(19:31):
the mother could feasibly stay home for financial reasons. However,
the United States, many of my girlfriends have chosen to
stay home with their children and are thrilled that they're
able to do this while their husband provides financial support.
So in that respect, I would say the US give
families and women more choices as far as how their
family is structured. It does not seem to me that
any country quite consciously eliminates such a big choice women

(19:51):
as being especially friendly to them. Pretty interesting thought to me.
It's very interesting. Well, I've got an email here from Annie,
and this is in response to our two part series
on a women's superheroes, and she writes, about a year
and a half ago, I started watching Zena Warrior Princess,
and I was shocked at what I found. After about
a season and a half of Good Can't Be Fun,

(20:13):
the storyline started deepening, the relationship between the two female leads,
Zena and Gabrielle deepened, and they started telling some seriously
complex tales as Zena fought for redemption. So now, even
at a quarter century, being alive and being a mostly
developed adult, I'm happy that strong women have found such
a place on television because I think It's pretty cool
that Zena of all shows, has given me two such

(20:36):
cool role models at this point in my life, and
it's actually led me to learn a little bit more
about my inner workings. Who knew so. Even if the
comic books are still trying to get it right, I
think female superheroes on television have been doing just fine.
So thank you Annie and to everyone else who has
written into mom Stuff. At how stuffworks dot com. You

(20:56):
can also head over to our Facebook page leave us
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(21:18):
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