Face it: Gifts we buy for our loved ones are always the worst

Thankfully I do not have to go through this... until I find my soul mate

http://www.canada.com/vancouversun/news/story.html?id=a9e8788c-edfd-4982-af93-ebc5a6e63490&k=69465

Love means giving lousy gifts
Study shows we are worst at buying gifts for those closest to us

Tom Spears
CanWest News Service

Monday, December 18, 2006

Most of us are surprisingly good at buying gifts for people we don't know very well. But gifts for spouses, boyfriends, girlfriends? Face it, we're awful.

Remember when you bought your wife that vacuum cleaner?

Two European marketing experts have done the analysis of what makes us buy those painfully wrong gifts, when every single neuron in our brains ought to be screaming: No! No! Put it back on the rack!

Those warning lights are indeed flashing, the professors conclude. We just don't pay attention to the signals.

So pay attention to this.

The consumer research comes from marketing professors Davy Lerouge (Tilburg University, the Netherlands) and Luk Warlop (Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Belgium). Don't bother picking up a copy for quick hints. It's 6,700 words long, and the sentences look like this: "Consequently, high levels of own attitude projection may persist, despite the availability of veridical feedback about the target's product attitudes."

And this: "Despite its low validity, predictors tend to use pre-stored information, thereby insufficiently adjusting for more diagnostic feedback."

What they're saying is that we think we know everything about our loved ones. No one has to tell us what colour she likes. But we're consistently wrong about this "pre-stored information."

And if our romantic interest happens to telegraph what he or she really wants, we ignore it. (That's the bit about "veridical feedback about the target's product attitudes." The target is the person we're buying for.)

That's the odd thing, Lerouge and Warlop write in the Journal of Consumer Research. If we have to buy a gift for a relative stranger (say, someone at work) we do pay attention to information about what he or she might like. Meanwhile we just sail right on past our spouses' longest and strongest signals, because we think we know it all. Worse, we buy for them what we like ourselves, thinking that our desires must be theirs as well.

Imagine a guy sitting at dinner, saying: "I saw a great little circular saw today. On sale at Home Depot. It's the Makita one. I really like the grip. Felt good. My old one burned out last week. Yes, I sure did like that circular saw today."

That's when his wife buys him the red sweater with dancing reindeer.

OK, maybe this is reasonable payback after the anniversary blender fiasco, and yes, she's a saint to be buying him anything at all, and the snowflakes are just adorable. Still, signals are getting lost.

Lerouge and Warlop tested their theory with several experiments.

In one, they took dozens of couples, and let each couple discuss what kind of home furnishings they liked. Then they asked each person to choose furniture from a catalogue for their other half.

The professors also asked everyone to choose for a stranger, "Person X," who was actually their spouse all over again. (For instance, the researchers wrote down a man's preferences and told his wife, "Hey, this is what some stranger likes. Can you pick something for him?")

Shoppers were pretty good at picking for Person X, indicating they can understand what other people would like. They just can't do it for their own spouses.

But why are we so dim-witted?

One problem is that we play many roles in a relationship, and a gift may not fit all of them, says Joan Harvey, a psychology professor at the University of Newcastle Upon Tyne in England.

Parent. Cook. Income earner. Vacation partner. Partygoer.

"You need a big dose of empathy, of what we would call emotional intelligence," she says. "You need to get a handle on what role your spouse or partner is seeing herself as fulfilling at the moment.

"It all comes to a head when things go wrong."

And don't kid yourself that these things don't matter.

"People will remember these things for years," says Harvey, even if they accept the gift as well-meaning at first.

"When things start to go wrong with the relationship, which is often through poor communication, this gets wheeled out as yet another example."

Back in the 1930s the Mills Brothers had a hit with You Always Hurt the One You Love. Maybe they were thinking about shopping.

© The Vancouver Sun 2006