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This study examines gift giving at Israeli weddings. In accordance with kin selection theory, we hypothesized that wedding guests possessing greater genetic relatedness to the newlyweds would offer greater sums of money as wedding gifts. We also hypothesized that family members stemming from the maternal side (where the genetic lineage has higher kinship certainty) would offer the newlyweds more money than those stemming from the paternal side. Data on the monetary gift sums of the wedding guests from 30 weddings were collapsed according to two criteria: (a) genetic relatedness (0%, 6.25%, 12.5%, 25%, and 50%) and (b) kinship certainty (maternal or paternal lineage). Both hypotheses were supported. We discuss the implications of these data in understanding family dynamics, as well as practical applications associated with the marketing of gifts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We utilize the Identity-Based Motivation (IBM) model to examine gift giving within the identity-stripping context of Nazi concentration camps, as reported in the memoirs of Holocaust survivors. By exploring gift giving in this crisis-laden context, we demonstrate the fundamental role gifts can play in reestablishing personal and social identities. In doing so, we provide insights into the motivations for giving that go beyond the existing paradigms that emphasize social exchange, economic exchange, or agapic giving. Further, we introduce the construct of anticipated reckoning, in which people self-regulate their behavior through an imagined future self whom they perceive to judge their current actions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on gift giving has devoted considerable attention to understanding whether and how givers succeed in choosing gifts that match recipients' tastes. On the contrary, this article focuses on how recipients' appreciation for a gift depends on the match between the gift and the giver. Four studies demonstrate that recipients are particularly appreciative when they receive gifts that figuratively match the giver, i.e., that contain references to the giver's characteristics, because they perceive such gifts as more congruent with the giver's identity. This effect is not conditional on inferences recipients might make about the giver's motivations or on whether recipients have a good relationship with the giver, but relies on the match concerning core rather than peripheral characteristics of the giver. Importantly for our understanding of identity-based motivation, these findings demonstrate in a gift-giving context that identity-congruence not only drives consumer behavior, but is also appreciated in other people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous research on gender differences in behavior has led to seemingly contradictory findings about generosity. From data generated by 290 subject pairs, we find that women are more sensitive than men to the costs of generous actions when deciding whether to be generous. The factors that affect the level of generosity observed in our experiments are reciprocal motivation, the level of money payoffs, and the level of social distance in the experimental protocol. The relatively greater sensitivity of women to the costs of generous behavior can explain most of the apparent inconsistencies in previously reported findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Gift relations have been traditionally theorized as antinomial to modernity or, within modernity, in the spheres of the personal relations and ideologies of altruism which dwell on the contrast with commodity and often cast themselves as residual, ‘traditional’ domains. This article explores claims to modernity that were made by public gift-giving to a modern head of state. It examines birthday gifts to the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin that he received from both his Soviet subjects and international leaders and movements and that were put on public display in 1949-53 in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow. This article interprets gift-giving to Stalin as a dramatic example of socialist intervention in the modernist temporality, and it theorizes the notions of time that were culturally constructed through the socialist state gift economy. This article reflects part of an ongoing research project on gift-giving to Soviet leaders. It is based on fieldwork, oral-historical and archival research with designers, artisans, and ordinary citizens who were involved in the production of the gift items, as well as with curators and other specialists involved in this exhibition and in preservation of these gifts in different Russian state museums. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the distinction between gift and market exchange which illuminates some basic and often unarticulated attitudes toward justice in family life. In "Justice, Gender, and the Family," Susan M. Okin has written an incisive critique of contemporary U.S. theories of distributive justice. She exposes the false gender neutrality of theorists who have discussed justice among human beings while ignoring the very different roles and expectations of women and men and who have assumed without acknowledgment the work of childbearing and child rearing performed by women. In "The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property," Lewis Hyde highlights the distinction between gift and market exchange. In both gift and market systems people exchange goods and services, but both objects and persons are viewed quite differently in the two systems. In a market exchange, someone offers a commodity for sale at a price, and someone else buys it. The terms are explicit by itself, the exchange creates no personal commitment or connection between the buyer and the seller. The ideals of gift exchange exemplified by the kula and other historical gift systems are equally found in contemporary Western etiquette surrounding the giving of presents.

The article presents a study that examines gift giving in Western society. Gift giving is the cement of social relationships. A range of feelings may be involved in gift giving. A gift may be inspired by sympathetic feelings or feelings of being involved in someone else's life. Mainly anthropologists have studied gift exchange. Anthropologists suggests a relationship between the closeness of social relationships and the purity of the gift, the extent to which it is given as an expression of sympathy and without concrete expectations of returns. They pointed to feelings of moral obligation involved in gift giving and they demonstrated how obligations might lead to patterns of reciprocity in gift exchange. Underlying these theoretical approaches is the relative share of "pure" gift giving, characterized by the absence or vagueness of expectations of return gift, versus gift giving based on expectations of reciprocity or feelings of mutual obligation. The result of the study suggests that friendships are emotionally more important than ties to extended kin.