Give till it helps

We’ve pored over catalogs, spent hours online, made umpteen harrowing treks to the mall.

We’ve hustled and bustled, been hassled and harried, shopped till we dropped (and dropped lots of cash too). We’re stressed as heck, and we’re not going to take this any more -- until next year.

If giving Christmas presents is so hard, why do people do it?

Evidence is piling up (like those packages under the tree) that human beings were born to give. Their very physiology makes them do it.

Studies show that when a person gives money to a stranger or a charity, the “rewards area” of the brain gets busy. It’s the same area that goes to town when the person eats a sugar cookie or finds a parking place at the mall or receives a gift of money from Ed McMahon.

Not only that, but generous people also seem to live longer and stay healthier than those “bah humbug” types, according to population studies. It’s even possible (scientists are busy testing this concept now) that the more Christmas spirit shoppers have, the fewer bugs they’re likely to catch during the holidays.

Gift-giving, in a nutshell, seems to improve people’s health and longevity. It lifts their mood and bolsters their ego. And perhaps most important of all, it makes people beholden to one another, so that when their goose is cooked, they have friends to save their skin. Or so goes the evolutionary theory.

“The most important thing I learned in writing a whole book about human relationships is ‘give more gifts,’ ” says evolutionary biologist Jay Phelan, a life sciences academic administrator at UCLA and co-author of “Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food: Taming Our Primal Instincts.”

A gift doesn’t have to be expensive, studies show. It really is the thought that counts -- well, the thought and the pretty wrapping.

But just try telling that to Joel Waldfogel.

“People are best suited to make choices for themselves,” says Waldfogel, a professor of business and public policy at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. The lesson from his own research? Don’t give gifts. Give money.

“How is gift-giving as a way of choosing stuff for me?” he says. “The answer is -- it’s a crummy way.”

Giving to live

Quite apart from the risk of receiving a lime-green polyester pant suit, gift-giving may seem foolish from an evolutionary, struggle-for-survival perspective. By hoarding resources (cashmere sweaters, pricey perfume, peppermint bark) instead of giving them to others you’d probably have more luck passing on your genes.

But survival is also helped by generosity of the one-good-turn-deserves-another variety, or the one-nice-gift-deserves-another-of-approximately-equal-value-and-thoug htfulness variety.

That’s called “reciprocal altruism,” and it has inspired many a mad dash to the mall.

“It’s a way of buffering yourself from an uncertain future,” Phelan says. “You never know when you might need help. When you have friends, you’re much better off.”

Because reciprocal altruism proved valuable for survival purposes, people evolved to feel a basic inclination to be generous and helpful -- and to feel good about it, according to several recent studies

For example, a report published in the November issue of the Public Library of Science’s journal, ONE, showed that the inclination to be generous is influenced by the hormone oxytocin. Give people extra doses of oxytocin, and they’ll be much more generous than they would be otherwise.

In the study, 68 male subjects were randomly assigned to pairs and then played games in which player A was given $10 and told to offer some of it to player B. If B accepted A’s offer, both of them would get to keep their shares of the money. But if B rejected the offer, they were both Scrooged, so to speak.

Clearly, it was in A’s self-interest to make the lowest offer he thought B would accept. But players who had inhaled a dose of oxytocin offered, on average, 21% more ($4.86) than players who had been given a placebo ($4.03).

Oxytocin is a hormone and neurotransmitter that is naturally stimulated by such things as touching or feeling trusted, and it has been shown to facilitate various social interactions, including the bonding of mother to child.

“I think of oxytocin as social glue,” says the study’s lead author Paul Zak, director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies at Claremont Graduate University in Claremont. “Oxytocin facilitates living in groups.”

The scientists conducted other experiments and found that oxytocin doses increased generosity 80%.

A second study, published last year in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also may have linked oxytocin to cheerful giving. The research, which investigated charitable giving, found it really may be better to give than to receive.

Using a brain-scanning technique known as functional magnetic resonance imaging, researchers led by Dr. Jorge Moll, head of the Neuroscience Unit-LABS-D’Or Network in Rio de Janeiro observed brain activity in 19 subjects while they made anonymous decisions to accept money for themselves or to make a charitable donation.

If subjects always decided in favor of their own monetary self-interest, they would walk off with $128.

But the amount they would get decreased every time they chose to make a donation in support of, or opposition to, one of a wide range of causes (including issues of abortion, the death penalty and nuclear power).

On average, subjects gave away $51 -- 40% of their possible payment.

When a subject decided to take some money, brain activity increased in several regions known collectively as the mesolimbic rewards area. But when a subject decided to donate some money, activity there increased even more, implying that giving is rewarding.

Donating money also led to increased activity in another part of the brain known as the subgenual cortex, a region that abounds in receptors for oxytocin, supporting the notion that giving is an important social act. Taking money, an act that doesn’t especially lubricate social interactions, left the subgenual cortex unfazed.

In this study and the oxytocin study, generous subjects paid a price -- leaving with less money than those who gave less money away. But the studies seem to imply that the rewards of being generous -- up to a point, at least -- outweighed the cost.

Of course, everyone produces oxytocin and has a subgenual cortex and a rewards area in the brain. Not surprisingly, “everybody will be altruistic if it’s cheap enough, and nobody will if it costs too much,” says William Harbaugh, professor of economics at the University of Oregon in Eugene.

And yet clearly, some have more Kris Kringle in them than others. What determines where each person draws the line?

Harbaugh led a team of researchers to probe people’s brains and find out. Specifically, they wanted to know if they could predict how altruistic people would be on the basis of activity in the rewards area of the brain.

In a study published in the June issue of Science, 19 female subjects were each given a bank account that started with a balance of $100. The balance went up and down with a series of deposits and withdrawals, half of which the subjects controlled, and half of which were automatic.

While this was going on, researchers tracked the subjects’ rewards area activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging.

The scientists found that nine of the subjects showed more activity in the rewards part of the brain when they received money automatically. (This group was called the “egoist” group.) The other 10 had more activity in the rewards center when money was automatically withdrawn from their accounts and donated to a food bank. (This was the “altruist” group.)

It was the first time researchers had found that nonvoluntary “donations” to a cause can increase activity in the rewards area of the brain, implying that some people may actually like to pay taxes for causes they believe in.

The subjects’ responses to automatic deposits and withdrawals were strongly related to the choices they made when they had a say over how the money was allocated. Altruists donated to the food bank almost twice as often as did egoists -- 58% versus 31% of the time. However, rewards area activity was greater for voluntary donations than for automatic ones -- very much as if the study had captured the so-called “warm glow” effect, the fuzzy, “I’m-a-good-person” feeling that comes from doing a kind deed.

“Brain activity really does predict how people behave,” says Ulrich Mayr, a professor of psychology at the University of Oregon and a co-author of the study.

It’s not all in your head

The rewards area of the brain is a little like Santa Claus. It knows if you’ve been bad or good, and if you’ve been good, i.e. if you’ve behaved in ways that evolution has determined to be good for you -- it gives you the gift of feeling happy or full or relaxed.

Of course, the rewards area can be tricked. Not everything that makes you feel good is good for you. (Think about eating a pound of fudge or drinking a quart of eggnog.)

But generous behavior may be the real deal. One study, reported in Psychological Science in 2003, found that over a five-year period, people who gave support to others were less likely to die than people who didn’t.

The study, conducted by a team led by Stephanie Brown, professor of internal medicine at the University of Michigan, looked at 423 older married couples. In interviews from 1987 and 1988, participants were asked if they had given (or received) instrumental support to (or from) friends, neighbors and relatives other than their spouses in the last year and if they had given emotional support to their spouses.

Instrumental support included providing transportation, running errands, going shopping, doing housework and providing child care. Emotional support consisted of making their spouses feel loved and cared for and being willing to listen if their spouses needed to talk.

The researchers then examined the individuals’ answers as well as whether they had died during the course of the study.

Results showed that those who gave instrumental support to others had a reduced mortality rate during the course of the study compared with those who hadn’t given such support and with those who’d received support. Giving emotional support to a spouse also reduced mortality risk.

All in all, just as the earlier study suggested that giving money away can be better than receiving it, this study showed that giving support to others can be better than receiving it.

This study was one of more than 30 reviewed in a May report by the Corporation for National and Community Service. The report’s main findings: Volunteers have lower mortality rates, function at a higher level, physically and cognitively and are less likely to be depressed in later life than people who don’t volunteer.

Older volunteers are likely to receive greater health benefits from volunteering than younger volunteers, and those who volunteer about 100 hours a year are most likely to receive health benefits from volunteering. The study also found that mortality risk and heart disease rates are lower in states with higher volunteer rates.

Studies finding links between altruism and health haven’t determined why altruism is so good for your health, but oxytocin may have a hand in it, Brown suggests. The hormone is known to lower heart rates and blood pressure, promote wound-healing and reduce the effects of stress.

Brown is now conducting an experimental study of Christmas shoppers to see if their attitudes affect how likely they are to get sick over the holidays.

Her team of researchers has been scurrying around malls asking shoppers questions such as: How much do you care about the people you’re shopping for? How good do you feel about the presents you’re buying? How happy do you think recipients will be with your presents?

About a week from now, researchers will call the shoppers back and ask if they stayed well or got sick since last they met.

The hypothesis: Shoppers who really like the people they’re shopping for and are excited about the wonderful presents they’re buying them will stay healthier than shoppers who really don’t know what to get for people they really don’t care that much about.

That is, truly altruistic shoppers will stay healthier than Grinches.

The ‘dead weight’ theory

If Brown’s hypothesis turns out to be true, it may be bad news for the health of Joel Waldfogel of the Wharton School, a highly respected economist and very nice man who every December turns into the Grinch who wrote “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas.”

In 1993, Waldfogel was a professor at Yale and the recipient of one too many preposterous presents. He began taking surveys in his undergraduate classes and confirmed his suspicions: On average, when you exclude sentimental value, the value a recipient places on a gift is less than the gift giver spent on it -- at least 10% less, and maybe more.

This, in economic terms, represents a “dead-weight loss,” or a waste of resources.

And because the National Retail Federation predicts that holiday sales will reach nearly $500 billion this year, that would make the dead-weight loss of Christmas 2007 almost $50 billion.

Not everyone buys Waldfogel’s arguments.

A study finding no dead-weight loss -- finding instead that gifts create positive value -- was published in 1996 in the American Economic Review, the same journal in which Waldfogel’s paper had appeared three years before.

The authors cited several possible reasons gifts might create, not lose, value: A gift could be something the recipient never knew existed or something frivolous the recipient felt guilty about buying, or something the recipient wanted an excuse to enjoy -- “It’s a gift!”

They also thought Waldfogel’s idea of trying to separate out sentimental value was hopeless (although they attempted to do it in their study too.)

A couple of years later, two more economists entered the fray. In their report, they tried to quantify how much people really valued the gifts they’d been given by forcing them to auction the gifts.

When faced with the prospect of truly giving up a gift, people put a higher price on it than when asked about it in a survey, the method used by Waldfogel.

Waldfogel is sticking to his guns. In 2002 and 2005, he published two more studies in which he continued to find evidence for a dead-weight loss. He’s also found that some gift givers, insecure about their proficiency in the gift-selection department, are more likely to give cash gifts than more self-confident givers, despite the stigma associated with giving plain old unadulterated money.

Next year he plans to go international. Do gift givers in other countries, he wonders, throw away their money too?

And so the debate rages on, with no peace in sight.

Could gift cards be the answer? Gift cards are sort of like money, but they’re not money. They’re sort of like gifts, but such safe gifts. You can’t get the wrong size, wrong color or wrong style.

OK, you can get the wrong store. And gift cards can get lost. And lose value. And expire. In fact, experts say, nearly $8 billion worth of gift cards went to waste last year.

Gift cards: The new dead-weight loss of Christmas?

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What makes a perfect present?

The best gift Ed Cunningham ever received -- a little soldier suit -- was waiting for him under the Christmas tree more than 60 years ago.

It may even have been a perfect gift as defined by Russell Belk, chair in marketing at the Schulich School of Business at York University in Toronto. Belk has synthesized and analyzed several decades of research and theory to arrive at six “perfect gift” criteria:

It requires an extraordinary sacrifice.

It’s meant only to please the recipient.

It’s a luxury.

It’s uniquely appropriate to the recipient.

It surprises the recipient.

The recipient wants it and is delighted by it.

When Cunningham, a retired greeting-card writer who lives in Kansas City, Mo., received his soldier suit as a 4-year-old, the world was at war and his family wasn’t rich. And he knows no strings were attached -- no new chores for little Ed.

The exact-replica suit wasn’t a necessity, but it was particularly appropriate to a youngster whose heroes were all in the military service. It surprised and delighted him, and although he hadn’t known such an item existed, the instant he saw it, he wanted it with all his heart.

Perfection? “I thought so then,” Cunningham says. “I still do.”

Karen Ravn

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When gifts go wrong

“He said that he liked it, but I perfectly saw . . . that he was lying.”

“She immediately let me know that she did not know what she was supposed to do with this ‘thing.’ ”

“It was a sweater. I have never seen her wear it since. Not once.”

“I was not given a thank-you, and [the] gift [was] never mentioned.”

Just a few of the comments of gift-givers in a study of gifts-gone-wrong that was published last year in the journal Psychology and Marketing.

The report -- “Moments of Truth in Gift Exchanges” -- examined bad gifts, the people who get them, what they say to the people who gave them -- and what happens next.

Among the study’s findings:

More than half of all givers in the study said they would have felt better if the recipient had just said thank you.

In general, gifts gone wrong -- or “gift failure,” as the study terms it -- can have a large effect on future gift exchanges: If folks dis the lovely fondue pot you bought them you’re likely to not bother buying them something that nice next year.

Failed gifts have a small effect on the relationship between giver and recipient -- unless, that is, the relationship already has problems. In that case, a failed gift can be the last straw.

And bad gifts to friends, co-workers and in-laws are more likely to upset relationships than bad gifts between parents, spouses and children.

“Of course, people tend to forgive children,” says study author Catherine Roster, professor of marketing information and decision sciences at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque.

Some gift choices are iffier than others. For example, it’s usually a mistake to give serious collectors the thing they collect, Roster says. The gifts most likely to be duds? “Clothing, especially sweaters,” she says. “Those are definitely perilous.”

Julie Ruth, a professor of marketing at Rutgers University in Camden, N.J., reported in 1999 in the Journal of Consumer Research that Christmas and other ritual gift-giving occasions can have an especially negative effect on how a gift is received -- and, ultimately, on a relationship:

Because gifts are exchanged simultaneously, there’s no chance to calibrate how much to spend, so gifts may be wildly different in value -- e.g., a CD from one person, a CD player from the other.

Also, someone you don’t like may use the holiday as an excuse to give you a gift, which makes you feel irritated, even obligated, instead of grateful.

The biggest risk factor? Having an audience. “Descriptions of controlling or inappropriate gifts are laced with laments over the presence of others,” Ruth and co-authors wrote. As one interviewed subject put it, “I realized it was a gift from my ‘Secret Santa.’ When I looked inside, I found a pair of women’s underwear. I became nervous and fearful, mainly because of the reaction (amusement) from my other studio mates.”

-- Karen Ravn

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Giving to get something

Many people feel a warm glow when they make a voluntary donation to charity, but fundraisers know not to depend just on that. They know they’ll get more if they tap into the human desire for more concrete rewards.

A hospital, for example, might promise that anyone who gives $1,000 to $2,499 to a building drive will get his or her name on a plaque in the building. Faced with such a range, William Harbaugh, an economist at the University of Oregon, has shown that “almost everyone” would donate $1,000, he says -- that is, the minimum to get the reward. Another popular fundraising approach is the lottery -- for every dollar they give, donors buy a chance to win a prize. In a study conducted during a real-life door-to-door fundraising campaign and published in 2006 in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, researchers found that lotteries raised about 50% more than regular solicitations (i.e., ones with no chance for prizes). The increase was largely due to greater participation. People were about twice as likely to donate when doing so bought them a chance to win a prize.

The study’s other major finding was “the beautiful-girl effect,” in the words of John List, one of the authors and an economist at the University of Chicago.

Female solicitors who were rated notably more attractive than average increased the amount raised by 35% to 72%. Like the lottery effect, the increase was largely due to greater participation, but in this case it was true only when a male answered the door.

-- Karen Ravn