Adelle X. Yang

Idleness Aversion and the Need for Justifiable Busyness

There are many apparent reasons why people engage in activity, such as to earn money, to become famous, or to advance science. In this report, however, we suggest a potentially deeper reason: People dread idleness, yet they need a reason to be busy. Accordingly, we show in two experiments that without a justification, people choose to be idle; that even a specious justification can motivate people to be busy; and that people who are busy are happier than people who are idle. Curiously, this last effect is true even if people are forced to be busy. Our research suggests that many purported goals that people pursue may be merely justifications to keep themselves busy.

Smile-Seeking Givers and Value-Seeking Recipients: Why Gift Choices and Recipient Preferences Diverge

Prior research on gift giving has often treated “making recipients happy” as interchangeable with “improving recipients’ welfare.” We propose givers’ motive to make recipients happy is better understood as a desire to induce positive affective reactions, such as a smile from recipients. This “smile-seeking” motive yields a mismatch between gift choices and recipients’ preferences, because attributes that promote recipient happiness upon gift reception are often not the same attributes that augment recipients’ overall welfare. We find a considerable givers-recipients preference discrepancy that cannot be explained by extant theories of perspective taking (Studies 1 & 2), is mitigated when the affective reactions are not immediately obtainable (Studies 3 & 4), and is mediated by the anticipation of these affective reactions (Studies 4 & 5). Moreover, in a longitudinal field survey (Study 6), givers derive more enjoyment from their observation of the recipients’ initial affective reactions than from their observation of recipients’ long-term satisfaction. Our findings challenge extant assumptions about gift-giving motives, and attest to the importance of affective reactions in interpersonal decision making.

Eager to Help Yet Reluctant to Give: How Pro-Social Effort and Pro-Social Choices Diverge

Charity marketers face the challenge of understanding how pro-social decisions are made. Are all solicitations made equal? The authors found that a helping opportunity and a giving opportunity reveal different pro-social preferences. In a series of four studies, involving hypothetical and real pro-social opportunities, participants showed high willingness to help (i.e. exerted more task effort for a charitable cause than for themselves), as well as reluctance to give (i.e. the majority kept resources for themselves rather than giving to charity, when given a choice). The authors propose that the consideration of direct self-interest plays a key role in the observed discrepancy. When deliberate consideration of direct self-interest is activated, as in direct choices, it trumps other motives, resulting in more selfish behaviors. When the direct self-interest remains implicit, as in effort persistence, pro-social behaviors can be effectively driven by other indirectly beneficial motives, such as the pursuit of meaningfulness. These findings have important practical implications for how charitable organizations can convey their needs effectively and design persuasive marketing messages.

Idleness versus busyness

The elapse of time disregards the human will. Yet different uses of time result in distinct perceptions of time and psychological consequences. In this article, we synthesize the growing research in psychology on the actual and perceived consumption of time, with a focus on idleness and busyness. We propose that the desire to avoid an unproductive use of time and the ceaseless pursuit of meaning in life may underlie many human activities. In particular, while it has been long presumed that people engage in activities in order to pursue goals, we posit a reverse causality: people pursue goals in order to engage in activities.

The Smile-Seeking Hypothesis: How Immediate Affective Reactions Motivate and Reward Gift Giving:

People making decisions for others often do not choose what their recipients most want. Prior research has generally explained such preference mismatches as decision makers mispredicting recipients’ satisfaction. We proposed that a “smile-seeking” motive is a distinct cause for these mismatches in the context of gift giving. After examining common gift options for which gift givers expect a difference between the recipients’ affective reaction (e.g., a smile when receiving the gift) and overall satisfaction, we found that givers often chose to forgo satisfaction-maximizing gifts and instead favor reaction-maximizing gifts. This reaction-maximizing preference was mitigated when givers anticipated not giving the gift in person. Results from six studies suggest that anticipated affective reactions powerfully shape gift givers’ choices and giving experiences, independently of (and even in spite of) anticipated recipient satisfaction. These findings reveal a dominant yet overlooked role that the display of affective reactions plays in motivating and rewarding gift-giving behaviors and shed new light on interpersonal decision making.