Looking a gift horse in the mouth: Suspicion of large gift expenditures undermines gift appreciation

Abstract

Prior work shows that gift recipients are surprisingly insensitive to the amount of money givers spend, even though more expensive gifts represent a greater investment by givers and impart greater value to recipients. We suggest that recipients' apparent indifference may be explained by competing reactions to gift expenditure. Specifically, we propose that recipients are not unresponsive to gift expenditure, per se, but that money's association with instrumentality means that conspicuous monetary expenditures can cause recipients to contemplate givers' instrumental motives (i.e., become suspicious). Four studies show that large gift expenditures can cause recipients to become suspicious of givers' motives and that suspicion undermines recipients' otherwise positive reactions. We further show that expenditures that are less strongly associated with instrumentality (time and effort) and gifts that have a weaker association with money and instrumentality (experiential gifts) are less prone to suspicion and are appreciated more.