“If you’re wondering what a Professor of Marketing at Nevada University, and a post-doctoral Fellow at the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University do to unwind,” began Howard Jacobson, on yesterdays ‘A Point Of View’ on Radio 4, “the answer is that they conduct a study into wrapping a gift, and then publish the results under the title of ‘Presentation Matters: The Effect Of Wrapping Neatness On Gift Attitudes.’”
So what exactly is a ‘gift attitude’? According to Howard, a self-confessed world’s worst gift wrapper, a gift attitude is the way you feel when someone gives you a gift. “Speaking from my own experience of receiving gifts, they can cause more grief than gladness,” the somewhat curmudgeonly Howard stated. “I’m reluctant to open them in the presence of the giver knowing that I won’t be able to hide my disappointment when I discover how little I want what I’ve been given. But I’m equally reluctant to displease, while not appearing impatient to find out. You could say I have a bad gift attitude.”
Yet as Howard points out, it’s not about how we feel about receiving gifts in general. “The question is how we feel when the gift is well wrapped as opposed to badly wrapped, and here the findings of the study are nothing short of sensational,” he claims. (Gift retailers and gift givers please take note!).
“According to the study, when the recipient opens a gift from a friend, they like it less when the giver has wrapped it neatly as opposed to sloppily, drawing on the expectation disconfirmations theory to explain the effect,” says the study.
‘Disconfirmation theory’, the authors reveal, “confirms why a beautifully wrapped gift will be found less endearing than one that comes in a scrunched up bin bag,” Apparently, the receiver expects so much more of the painstakingly wrapped present that they are bound to be disappointed when they open it, conversely, setting little store on a gift that looks like a dog’s dinner (Howard’s words). “It means that we can only be pleasantly surprised when we open it,” Howard points out.
So where does he stand on the subject of gift giving? Having always posed as an ‘intellectual’, he recalls inevitably being given “books, books and more books” as a child, yet fervently wanting the train sets, scooters or roller skates that his friends received. “Everyone thought they knew what I wanted and it didn’t have wheels,” he remembers forlornly. As a result, and somewhat out of revenge, all the writer ever gives to friends and family as gifts are, unsurprisingly, books, “wrapped, often as not, in a crisp packet that I haven’t taken the trouble to shake!” Bring out the rollwrap someone!
Top: The merits of gift wrapping is the subject of a new study from two American authors.
