In our final study, we find some evidence of an underlying psychological mechanism that helps to explain the link between gift
price and gift-givers’ expectations of recipients’ feelings of appreciation. As predicted, gift-givers assumed that more expensive gifts
conveyed a stronger signal of thoughtfulness and consideration,
and this signal in turn predicted anticipated feelings of appreciation.
The mediating role of thoughtfulness casts a different light
on the psychology of gift-givers—one that is more noble than crass
(cf. Camerer, 1988 ).
In particular, it seems that the goal givers have in mind in spending more money on gift purchases is to impress gift-recipients with their concern, rather than their cash. Unfortu-nately, gift-recipients may not share a similar thought process in deconstructing the meaning of more expensive gifts.
A critical concern surrounding these findings is social desirabil-ity bias—the tendency for people to provide answers that are so-cially acceptable and desirable rather than authentic (Fisher,
1993).
Three factors seem to cast doubt on this alternative expla-nation for our findings. First, the responses provided by partici-pants in two of our studies were anonymous, which previous research indicates can mitigate social desirability bias (Fisher &
Katz, 2000).
Second, we collected a measure of an individual’s pro-clivity to provide socially desirable responses, and even after con-trolling for this measure, our results remained significant.
Third, and perhaps more importantly, if social desirability bias impacted the results, one might expect those in the role of gift-recipient to
provide consistently higher ratings of appreciation than givers ex-pected (regardless of whether the gifts were large or small). How-ever, this was not the case.
Taken together, these results make a number of important con-tributions.