Reason versus feeling: relational norms influence gift choices

PurposeRelational norms, referring to shared values about behavioral rules, distinguish communal and exchange relationships based on different reciprocal expectations between actors. This research explains how reciprocal expectations behind the two relationships trigger gift givers' disparate behavioral goals and further determine their gift choices.Design/methodology/approachThe current work uses three lab experiments (N = 482) and one consumer survey (N = 422) to collect Chinese gifting data. Multiple data-analysis methods – crosstab analysis, ANOVA, linear regression and bootstrapping procedures – confirm the hypotheses.FindingsGift givers distinguish communal and exchange recipients. When selecting gifts for communal (exchange) recipients, people depended more strongly on rational analyses (intuition), preferring products superior on cognitive (affective) attributions. Further, givers primed to be rational decision-makers by anticipating that recipients would evaluate the gifts immediately in their presence, regardless of the communal or exchange context, preferred cognitively superior products.Practical implicationsFrom a managerial perspective, marketers can make targeted recommendations by highlighting the appropriate attribute dimension (cognitive or affective) after learning givers' reciprocal expectations.Originality/valueThis work contributes to the gift-giving literature by revealing the direct link between gifting goals and gift choices, extending the understanding of consumers' gift-selection strategies.

The Gift that Keeps on Giving: Google, Ingress, and the Gift of Surveillance

This essay analyzes Ingress, Google’s new massively multiplayer online game, as indicative of an emergent gift economy that calls for the datafication of one’s mobile life in exchange for the gift of play. From this perspective, Ingress is only suggestive of broader sociocultural transformations in which citizens must submit to pervasive surveillance in order to participate in contemporary economic and political life. Turning to Roberto Esposito’s recent work on gift-giving and communal exchange, we explain how Google “immunizes” itself from its consumer community by continuously collecting that community’s gift of surveillance while structuring its own conditions of reciprocity.

Prolonged plasticity: Necessary and sufficient for language-ready brains

Languages emerge in response to the negotiation of shared meaning in social groups, where transparency of grammar is necessitated by demands of communication with relative strangers needing to consult on a wide range of topics (Ragir 2002). This communal exchange is automated and stabilized through activity-dependent fine-tuning of information-specific neural connections during postnatal growth and social development.