The surprisingly selfish reason people give terrible gifts

It’s a question that has bedeviled all too many of us: how to deal with loved ones who just keep giving us bad gifts. 

The National Retail Federation estimates that last winter, about $966 billion worth of merchandise was sold over the holiday period — and about $148 billion of that likely returned. A survey from consumer research firm CivicScience showed that 28 percent of people had returned or exchanged a gift last year. According to Statista, the most wanted Christmas gift among US consumers is cold hard cash. The second most popular? Gift cards. The message seems to be: Thanks for the thought, but let me just choose what I want.

Over a single year, let alone an entire lifetime, you might amass a pile of stuff you won’t ever use, taking up valuable space in your home. Do you harden your heart and simply give all of it away? Do you attempt to return every unwanted item as soon as you receive it? What about the things that don’t spark joy, per se, but do have some sentimental value?

Standard etiquette advises us to remain gracious even in the face of laughably bad gifts, but research in the social psychology of gift-giving suggests we might be granting bad gift-givers too much benefit of the doubt. Sometimes, an ill-fitting gift is ill-fitting on purpose; it’s not mere miscommunication, but negative, even resentful communication. At the heart of solving this perennial problem is taking a good hard look at what motivates us to confer gifts unto others in the first place. 

How to politely deal with well-meaning – but unwanted – gifts

The question of what to do with gifts you won’t use is a popular etiquette question “in a world of more and more consumer goods,” according to Daniel Post Senning, an etiquette expert at The Emily Post Institute. Generally, “gifts should be received in the same spirit of generosity that they’re given in,” says Senning. “If you don’t particularly appreciate the gift itself, the expectation is that you thank [them] for the effort or thought that went into it.”

With that in mind, Senning says that it’s not an etiquette cardinal sin to regift something if you know you can’t use it – for example, if you already happen to have the item. But you should avoid regifting anything handmade or personalized. “Beyond that, it’s about being upfront, ethical, honest” with the original gifter, if they ask, and the new recipient, Senning tells Vox. After all, a gift should be freely given with no obligations, and that includes the recipient having some choice in what they decide to do with the gift. (This is also a reminder to include a gift receipt whenever possible.) 

Even after the etiquette issue is resolved, it can be tricky figuring out which gifts you’ll no longer keep. “It’s usually easier to begin with items that have less sentimental value,” Juliet Landau-Pope, a productivity coach who has written about decluttering your home of unwanted gifts, tells Vox in an email. Larger items that take up a lot of space might be prime candidates for the initial decluttering, whether they’re going to be regifted or donated. 

If there’s someone in your life who would appreciate a regift, you should ideally let them know that you were given something you can’t use for insert-reason-here but would love to give them. Clothes — a common but often miscalculated gift — jewelry, and household goods can all go to a Goodwill location or a local family shelter. Furniture, appliances, and other household items can also be donated to Habitat for Humanity’s ReStore program.   

“One of my core beliefs is that everything comes into your life for a reason but that doesn’t mean you need to keep it forever,” Landau-Pope says. Take the example of greeting and holiday cards, which may be piling up in your drawer or taking over your fridge. Landau-Pope’s personal policy is to keep handmade cards from her children, while displaying the others for a set period of time, taking a picture of the display, and then recycling them. 

Why so many of us get bad gifts

In the ideal gift exchange scenario, we probably want to grace the people in our lives with gifts that will be met with undeniable enthusiasm. So why is it that we so often end up saddled with bad ones? 

It might be an expectations mismatch: As Julian Givi, a marketing professor at West Virginia University, explains, “Whenever we’re gift-givers, we really focus on making people happy the moment that they’re opening the gift.” In order words, we prioritize the drama of a big reveal, as opposed to whether the gift is useful and valuable years down the road. 

Then there are all the other unintentional ways we might give a bad gift. We might overestimate how passionate someone is about a hobby, sports team, or something else they once mentioned offhand. We might miss the mark simply because we don’t know enough about the other person; we wouldn’t guess in a million years that they have a bad childhood association with receiving hand-knit sweaters, for example. 

Unfortunately, research shows that there are more sinister motives for giving subpar gifts than we’d like to think. For one, some people know exactly what a recipient wants — maybe they have a gift registry — but they buy something else anyway because the options presented are boring to them personally, says Givi. Another selfish motivation his research has discovered: people resist choosing gifts (like, say, a nice pair of sunglasses) that are better than the versions they own, likely to avoid feeling envious.

Deborah Cohn, a marketing professor at the New York Institute of Technology, has identified five broad patterns for how lousy gifts happen. On the more innocuous side is due to ritual and obligation. “You’re going to be at a party, you have to bring somebody something,” Cohn tells Vox. But you don’t know enough about them or just don’t want to expend the mental effort of figuring out what they’d really want, so you grab something perfunctory.

A more aggressive (but all too common) type of bad gift-giving is when the gift is intended to impose a certain identity on the recipient. We’ve all heard stories about parents who only give dolls and dresses to their daughters, and Legos and video games to their sons. It’s not that these givers don’t understand what their individual children’s real preferences are. It’s that they want to foist their own desire upon the recipient.

“This actually happened to me,” says Cohn. “Somebody gave me a book about a religion that I don’t ascribe to.”

Other typical bad gift-giving habits stem from pure self-centeredness, like picking out headphones for your spouse that you intend to use or wanting bragging rights for presenting the splashiest (read: most expensive) gift at the party. These kinds of gift-giving behaviors aren’t mistakes, and they aren’t innocent, Cohn contends. “It’s selfish,” she says. “It’s thinking more about yourself than the recipient, and people can see right through it.” Right now, Cohn is working on further research on whether there’s a correlation between habitually bad gift-giving and narcissism.

How to be a better gift-giver

Individual tastes in gifts can vary greatly, but there are some broad strokes of what people tend to appreciate. According to Givi, sentimental gifts — for example, something handmade or connected to a memory that the two of you share — are often underrated by gift-givers. Another finding in Givi’s research was that people tend to appreciate gifts that are given “out of the blue, as opposed to gifts that we receive on our birthday or any other special occasion.” The fact that it’s not being presented out of any social obligation may emphasize that the thought behind a gift really does count.

Being a good gift-giver also involves imagining ourselves in another’s shoes. It takes conscious effort. You genuinely need to ask yourself what this particular person would want, not what you or some other abstract of a person would want in the same situation. It probably doesn’t help, then, that there’s still some social awkwardness around being explicit about what you want to be gifted and what you’d hate to receive. Maybe to some people, maintaining a regularly updated gift registry is gauche, but if you’re concerned about your pile of unused gifts gathering dust in the closet, taking the surprise out of gift-giving does seem like the preferable option. (According to Senning, it’s perfectly all right for gifters to ask for some direction on what gifts someone would like.)

Cohn recalls the memory of a bad gift she got in childhood: a prank played on her by her father in which every gift box just contained a smaller one, with nothing inside the last. It motivated her to study what gifts mean and how people communicate through them. She told her mother how the prank had made her feel; when Cohn finished her dissertation, her mother gave her another set of nested boxes, this time full of chocolates. “I think that was the best gift I ever got because she wanted to take away my pain. That’s what that gift was meant to do,” she says.