The shadow side of social gift-giving: miscommunication and failed gifts

Communication Research Trends, Sept, 2006 by J.D. Sunwolf

Today, our relational gifts are largely economic purchases. This is a moral dilemma for givers. Tom Beaudoin (2003), a Religious Studies professor at Santa Clara University, has suggested that one of the most challenging areas of integrating spirituality with economic decisions is enveloped in gift purchases. In Consuming Faith: Integrating Who We Are With What We Buy, Beaudoin suggests that we should morally consider the human cost of gift objects (third world laborers, environmental destruction, toxic waste). Beaudoin (2004) persuasively argues that we can integrate our gift practices with our conscious choices about how to live, considering the gift chain (those who make, purchase, receive, and dispose of our gifts):

   Framing our holiday gift practices as opportunities
   for affirmatives of dignity, as occasions for
   practicing thankfulness for the gifts that we are,
   helps make the holidays a spiritual exercise. Not
   to sound too pious, but this may require a new
   commitment to prayer or meditation in order to
   help us consent to a new perspective on our gift
   practices. (p. 12)

The moral dilemma for receivers, on the other hand, may lie in wanting what we have. Our desire for objects may taint the relational messages people are trying to share with us in gifts. Miller (1995) is a cognitive psychologist who engages in a lively moral debate that encourages us to reflect on the effects our possessions may have on us. Failed gifts can be the product of our struggle with our continual yearning for things. The suffering of gift receivers has been under-explored, but is embedded in moral questions, which help us redefine our personal gift practices.

   It should always come from the heart, and if they
   laugh at you or don't appreciate it--it is their
   heart that is small, not yours.

   --16-year old female student
   (Sunwolf, in press)

6. New Lenses for Looking at an Old Event: Rewrapping Gift Scholarship

Larsen and Watson (2001) concluded that the type of gift given is always a reflection of the type of relationship and that as relationships become more intimate, gifts become more expressive. Nominal gift giving, in fact, may constitute little more than the ritual exchange (and subsequent disposal) of merchandise. Relational gift giving at its best, however, is not a prerequisite to a close relationship, but one of its symptoms.

Here, several questions are urged that are worthy of our consideration as teaching-scholars: (a) In what ways can we include gift giving in the content of college courses on relationships in ways that help our students redefine their gift practices? (b) Can our personal research agendas in mass media, film, journalism, rhetoric, or interpersonal scholarship be enriched to include gift messages and relational outcomes? and (c) What theories that explain the processes of social gift giving and receiving in relationships can be developed or imported to add to our understanding of this fundamental communication event?

I recently explored the intriguing intersection between several communication perspectives and concepts from our sister social sciences and offered Decisional Regret Theory to explain and describe painful decision-making (Sunwolf, 2006). Decisional Regret Theory suggests that when we are faced with salient personal decisions, we begin to anticipate choice-regret, which makes us anxious. We attempt to reduce that anxiety by telling ourselves, then sharing with others, counterfactual stories about the possible consequences of our choice (what-if and if-only stories). This counterfactual-storythinking is useful for explaining the painful process of gift choosing and gift interpretation. Recent explorations of a "science of happiness" have suggested that new understandings of our brain's hard wiring show we are often wrong about what will, in fact, bring us (or others) happiness (Layard, 2005; Nettle, 2005). These happiness studies offer new explanations about why some people are happy and others are not that have rich application for explaining failed gift messages.