Are women better at buying gifts?



The answer to the question in the title is in the affirmative. Before you begin to question my judgment I should say that I have research to back this claim.

In a study, participants were visited at home for a survey. The participants consisted of family dyads, romantic couples, and friendship dyads.  Dyad members knew each other, on average, for 16 years. They were given a booklet containing 30 products with the value of each product being around 20 euros. These products were selected based on some pretesting and were equally attractive to both genders. They were first asked to select 10 products that they would like to receive as a gift and then they were asked to select 10 products that they thought their relative/partner/friend would like to receive. The quality of gift selection was calculated for each participant as the number of gifts they chose, that also appeared on the list of the counterpart. This ranged from 0 to 10.

They results of the study finds that women are indeed better at selecting gifts than men. They also find that people are not any better in selecting a gift for a recipient of the same gender than for a recipient of the other gender.

In the second study, a new sample had to choose a gift for a young female. The young female indicated her preferences, which served as the objective criteria to evaluate the quality of gifts. In this study as well, women were more likely to select gifts that matched the preferences of the young girl. In the final study, participants had to choose for 9 different targets of different age groups and gender. This also concluded that women were better at choosing gifts.

One of the reasons why women are better at buying gifts is because they spend more time in buying gifts. Or maybe they care more?

The paper by Pollmann and van Beest can be found  here.

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