Ask and You Shall (Not) Receive: Close Friends Prioritize Relational Signaling over Recipient Preferences in Their Gift Choices

Gift givers balance their goal to please recipients with gifts that match recipient preferences against their own goal to signal relational closeness with gifts that demonstrate their knowledge of the recipient. Five studies in a gift registry context show that when close (vs. distant) givers receive attribution for the gifts they choose, they are more likely to diverge from the registry to choose items that signal their close relationships. The authors find that close givers’ divergence from the registry is not the result of their altruistic search for a “better” gift but is a strategic effort to express relational signals: it occurs only when givers will receive attribution for their choice. They show that close givers reconcile their goal conflict by engaging in motivated reasoning, which results in their perceptual distortion of the gift options in favor of relational-signaling gifts. Ironically, distant givers are more likely to choose gifts from the registry, resulting in the selection of items that better match recipient preferences.