The Anxiety Formula, Read Against Its Paper

Our deep dive The Anxiety Formula retells David B. Wooten’s 2000 study of why choosing and handing over a gift can make people anxious. We held no copy of the paper, so when our last correction round reached the page we left it as it was rather than guess at what the study said. Mark has now supplied the full paper, and the page has been read against it sentence by sentence.

What the paper confirms

Most of the page held. The words of the students and staff Wooten surveyed and interviewed are quoted exactly, among them the woman who would rather give no gift than an imperfect one and the young man buying for a friend he hoped to date. So is Wooten’s own question about why gift giving is “such a torturous endeavor for so many people”, and so are the survey timing, the two universities and the respondent who went $24 over her Secret Santa limit.

What it does not say

The sample was never 135 people. The paper reports surveys of 115 undergraduates and interviews with 20 adult employees, and it never adds the two together. The page now gives the two groups.

The formula is not Wooten’s. Anxiety as motivation multiplied by one minus efficacy comes from Leary (1983), the model of social anxiety Wooten took as his starting point. The page, the caption under its chart and the chart itself now credit Leary.

Three passages in quotation marks were Wooten’s summaries, not his participants’ words: the gamble of gaining a romantic partner or losing a friend, the belief that a gift could change a relationship, and a lack of creativity. Each is now given to Wooten or printed without quotation marks.

The page also told some findings past what he found. It said the perfectionist suffers most because she cares more than anyone, where Wooten places her anxiety in the demands she sets herself. It said most anxious givers miss a way to cut the risk, where the paper reports that anxious givers already reach for such strategies. It offered a formal baby shower as a first, unfamiliar occasion, where the paper’s example of a first is a wedding. And it said the young man hoped for connection and recognition, where Wooten reads the return he wanted as a social reward: the friend he hoped would date him.

Smaller lines on the same page

A sentence said our Christmas gifts for a girlfriend are chosen for an audience of her family; it now says only that each gift there is scored. Field Notes notebooks were called the highest trust score in our database, a score two other products share. And the chart described a Jacobsen Salt set priced at $35 as under $35.

Two earlier records

Two of our corrections cut lines about this study from other pages because no file of ours held the paper: one on our Christmas page on 22 October and one across 179 pages on 23 October. The second also said this deep dive stood as it was; with the paper in hand, it has changed. Those records stand as the account of what we could show on those days. The deep dive now keeps what the study supports, and the same paper is now the measure for the other pages that cite it.