Reading https://www.lesswrong.com/s/M3TJ2fTCzoQq66NBJ/p/3T6p93Mut7G8qdkAs and contemplating my own gift-giving and gift-getting, it strikes me that the “best of a cheap thing” technique works great on me for what I consider to be entirely valid reasons beyond just “let’s exploit cognitive biases to spend less”.
My perception of experiencing the effect is that the best-of-a-cheap-thing is likely to actually improve my day-to-day life, significantly more than certain expensive things. Let’s compare two gifts which have been given to me over the years, both of which I enjoy and appreciate:
A 2-pack of incredibly nice insulated glass coffee mugs, which likely cost about $40. (https://www.bodum.com/us/en/10606-10us-bistro, for the curious). I drink tea every day, and upgrading my teacup to an outrageously high-end teacup improves the aesthetics and ergonomics of that experience on a daily basis. These are competing against all my other teacups, and they are probably twice as enjoyable to use as a regular ceramic one.
A copy of the Codex Seriphinianus, a truly glorious tome of art which likely cost around $80. I “read” it perhaps 2 or 3 times per year, and when adjacent topics come up in conversation with friends I derive great delight from pulling out a real copy of the book and showing it to them. But my enjoyment of it for its general book-ness contrasts it against all the other books I own, and while it’s up there in probably my top 5 favorites, it wouldn’t be the one book I’d grab if I could keep only a single physical copy from my library.
If I had to rank those gifts by the total hedonic flux they cause over the lifetime of my owning them, though, the mugs are the obvious winner. The moment of “I have the perfect book for this!” is perhaps 10x or 50x more hedons than the moment of “I have the perfect mug for this!”, but the moment of “I have the perfect mug for this!” occurs maybe 100x more often than the “I have the perfect book for this!” one.
I speculate that a best-of-a-cheap-thing gift has the accidental side effect of improving the recipient’s experience far more frequently than a worst-of-an-expensive-thing one. This is particularly relevant when both gifts are in categories where the recipient owns at least one thing—I already owned books, and I already owned mugs, and the hypothetical adult recipient of a cheap gaming console very likely owns at least one other means of playing games. It’s extremely hard to find a book that I enjoy more than my favorite book, but before I got my nice mugs it was surprisingly easy to find a mug that I enjoy more than my previous favorite mug. When the recipient hasn’t fully optimized their lifestyle, there are often low-hanging fruit of items that they would use frequently but balk at spending more than a certain amount on for themself.
When I’m gifted the best-of-a-cheap-thing, such as a mug that’s better than all my other mugs, that gift improves the experience of using a mug every time I need to. If I was gifted a worst-of-an-expensive-thing (which fortunately does not tend to happen to me much if ever), such as a phone that’s worse than my current phone or a gaming system worse than my current gaming setup, I would likely never use the gift at all, for using it would be worse than using the alternative.
In other words, the “thoughtfulness” of a gift could be approximated by some “cost per hedon” metric, and for a gift to impart non-zero hedons to the recipient’s life it must be better in some way than what the person would have had without it. Some gifts impart positive hedons just by reminding the recipient to relive a positive emotional state from the past, such as a thoughtful card. However, giving a gift that’s worse than whatever the recipient was previously using for that purpose may actually impart negative hedons: the benefit of being reminded that you thought of them might be canceled out and then some by the hassle of having to figure out how to navigate the social morass of thanking you for something they’re not very thankful for, and figuring out how to appropriately dispose of the gift.
I received plenty of negative-hedon gifts in my childhood from wellmeaning family members. Gifts of clothing which I found uncomfortable or otherwise unpleasant are a great example: when I didn’t need or enjoy the gifted garment and receiving it didn’t change my understanding of how much the giver cared about me, the gift didn’t cause enjoyment. However, receiving any gift meant I had to write a note of gratitude and also figure out what to do with the item—use it, store it, or somehow get rid of it. These unpleasant exercises which would have been avoided without the gift displaced enjoyable activities that I would have preferred to engage in, inducing negative hedonic flux.
Lest I sound ungrateful, I’ll repeat that the negative hedonic effects of the gifts were possible because they didn’t change my understanding of how much the giver cared about me, and that’s usually because before getting the gift I already thought the giver’s opinion of and love for me were at the maximum that I could conceive of. If the gifts had come from someone whose regard and affection I was less certain of, they could have had a positive impact despite being equally unneeded and unenjoyable, because the process of receiving any gift from a person tends to increment my perception of the person’s regard for me.
Reading https://www.lesswrong.com/s/M3TJ2fTCzoQq66NBJ/p/3T6p93Mut7G8qdkAs and contemplating my own gift-giving and gift-getting, it strikes me that the “best of a cheap thing” technique works great on me for what I consider to be entirely valid reasons beyond just “let’s exploit cognitive biases to spend less”.
My perception of experiencing the effect is that the best-of-a-cheap-thing is likely to actually improve my day-to-day life, significantly more than certain expensive things. Let’s compare two gifts which have been given to me over the years, both of which I enjoy and appreciate:
A 2-pack of incredibly nice insulated glass coffee mugs, which likely cost about $40. (https://www.bodum.com/us/en/10606-10us-bistro, for the curious). I drink tea every day, and upgrading my teacup to an outrageously high-end teacup improves the aesthetics and ergonomics of that experience on a daily basis. These are competing against all my other teacups, and they are probably twice as enjoyable to use as a regular ceramic one.
A copy of the Codex Seriphinianus, a truly glorious tome of art which likely cost around $80. I “read” it perhaps 2 or 3 times per year, and when adjacent topics come up in conversation with friends I derive great delight from pulling out a real copy of the book and showing it to them. But my enjoyment of it for its general book-ness contrasts it against all the other books I own, and while it’s up there in probably my top 5 favorites, it wouldn’t be the one book I’d grab if I could keep only a single physical copy from my library.
If I had to rank those gifts by the total hedonic flux they cause over the lifetime of my owning them, though, the mugs are the obvious winner. The moment of “I have the perfect book for this!” is perhaps 10x or 50x more hedons than the moment of “I have the perfect mug for this!”, but the moment of “I have the perfect mug for this!” occurs maybe 100x more often than the “I have the perfect book for this!” one.
I speculate that a best-of-a-cheap-thing gift has the accidental side effect of improving the recipient’s experience far more frequently than a worst-of-an-expensive-thing one. This is particularly relevant when both gifts are in categories where the recipient owns at least one thing—I already owned books, and I already owned mugs, and the hypothetical adult recipient of a cheap gaming console very likely owns at least one other means of playing games. It’s extremely hard to find a book that I enjoy more than my favorite book, but before I got my nice mugs it was surprisingly easy to find a mug that I enjoy more than my previous favorite mug. When the recipient hasn’t fully optimized their lifestyle, there are often low-hanging fruit of items that they would use frequently but balk at spending more than a certain amount on for themself.
When I’m gifted the best-of-a-cheap-thing, such as a mug that’s better than all my other mugs, that gift improves the experience of using a mug every time I need to. If I was gifted a worst-of-an-expensive-thing (which fortunately does not tend to happen to me much if ever), such as a phone that’s worse than my current phone or a gaming system worse than my current gaming setup, I would likely never use the gift at all, for using it would be worse than using the alternative.
In other words, the “thoughtfulness” of a gift could be approximated by some “cost per hedon” metric, and for a gift to impart non-zero hedons to the recipient’s life it must be better in some way than what the person would have had without it. Some gifts impart positive hedons just by reminding the recipient to relive a positive emotional state from the past, such as a thoughtful card. However, giving a gift that’s worse than whatever the recipient was previously using for that purpose may actually impart negative hedons: the benefit of being reminded that you thought of them might be canceled out and then some by the hassle of having to figure out how to navigate the social morass of thanking you for something they’re not very thankful for, and figuring out how to appropriately dispose of the gift.
I received plenty of negative-hedon gifts in my childhood from wellmeaning family members. Gifts of clothing which I found uncomfortable or otherwise unpleasant are a great example: when I didn’t need or enjoy the gifted garment and receiving it didn’t change my understanding of how much the giver cared about me, the gift didn’t cause enjoyment. However, receiving any gift meant I had to write a note of gratitude and also figure out what to do with the item—use it, store it, or somehow get rid of it. These unpleasant exercises which would have been avoided without the gift displaced enjoyable activities that I would have preferred to engage in, inducing negative hedonic flux.
Lest I sound ungrateful, I’ll repeat that the negative hedonic effects of the gifts were possible because they didn’t change my understanding of how much the giver cared about me, and that’s usually because before getting the gift I already thought the giver’s opinion of and love for me were at the maximum that I could conceive of. If the gifts had come from someone whose regard and affection I was less certain of, they could have had a positive impact despite being equally unneeded and unenjoyable, because the process of receiving any gift from a person tends to increment my perception of the person’s regard for me.