D

Every day, millions of shoppers hit the stores in full force—both online and on foot— searching for the perfect gift. Aside from purchasing holiday gifts, most people regularly buy presents for other occasions throughout the year, including weddings, birthdays, anniversaries, graduations, and baby showers. This frequent experience of gift-giving can cause ambivalent feelings in gift-givers. Many enjoy the opportunity to buy presents because gift-giving offers a powerful means to build stronger bonds with one’s closest persons. At the same time, many fear the thought of buying gifts; they worry that their purchases will disappoint rather than delight the intended receivers.

What is surprising is that gift-givers have considerable experience acting as both gift-givers and gift-recipients, but nevertheless tend to overspend each time they set out to purchase a meaningful gift. In the present research, we propose a unique psychological explanation for this overspending problem — i.e., that gift-givers equate how much they spend with how much receivers will appreciate the gift (the more expensive the gift, the stronger a gift-recipient’s feelings of appreciation). Although a link between gift price and feelings of appreciation might seem intuitive (凭直觉得到的) to gift-givers, such an assumption may be unfounded. Indeed, we propose that gift- receivers will seldom tend to base their feelings of appreciation on the significance weight of a gift than givers assume.

Why do gift-givers assume that gift price is closely linked to gift-recipients’ feelings of appreciation? Perhaps givers believe that bigger (i.e., more expensive) gifts convey stronger signals of thoughtfulness and consideration. According to Camerer (1988) and others, gift-giving represents a symbolic ritual(礼节), by which gift-givers attempt to signal their positive attitudes toward the intended receiver and their willingness to invest resources in a future relationship. In this sense, gift-givers may be motivated to spend more money on a gift in order to send a “stronger signal” to their intended receiver. As for gift-receivers, they may not consider smaller and larger gifts as representing smaller and larger signals of thoughtfulness and consideration.

In practical terms, people spend hundreds of dollars each year on gifts, but somehow never learn to measure their gift expenses according to personal insight.

【语篇导读】本文是一篇议论文。作者论述了送礼物的三个方面内容。送礼物是为了加深情感；送礼者的思维方式；礼物的价钱和收礼者的感激程度相关联。