The Pen Study Our Wife Page Stretched to Marriage

Our Christmas gifts for wife page leaned on one paper, and it is a paper we hold in full: the 2014 study by Baskin, Wakslak, Trope and Novemsky on why ease of use weighs more with a gift’s receiver than with its giver. The page credited that paper with things it never says. It counted 2,500 people across the eight studies, a total the paper gives nowhere. It told readers that a wife handed the practical gift felt more cared for, yet no study in the paper involved a wife or a husband; its one real exchange was between friends, one picking a pen for the other.

One figure was pinned to the wrong experiment. The 5.28 against 3.84 that an answer credited to givers asked to picture specific use came from comparing givers whose friend lived in the same town with givers whose friend lived more than 500 miles away. Another answer said the study calls such gifts desirable ones that fail in daily life; in the paper, desirable means higher in quality and harder to use, and nothing is said to fail.

Other lines had nothing behind them. A copper pan used once and a skillet used every Tuesday were scenes of our own. The line that husbands imagine the unwrapping while wives imagine the using is not in the paper. Nor is a test in February: if anything, its authors suggest a receiver may come to enjoy a more creative gift as time passes. The budget answer put most couples at $100 to $250 and a 10th or 25th Christmas together at up to $350, figures nothing we hold supports, and weighed a $53 Japanese porcelain teapot, a price no teapot among its picks carries, against a $250 jewelry set. It also held up a mug said to have 3,000 people waiting for it, a mug absent from its picks.

The headline promised gifts that impress, the opposite of what the paper beneath it argues, and the description under the title in search results promised picks that clear a high bar.

The page now reports the study as it was run. Its research block gives the pen exchange with the paper’s own figures and adds that the givers could not tell which pen their own friend would like better. Its answers draw on the paper’s other experiments as they were designed, on the 2016 review of gift-giving errors by Galak, Givi and Williams, and on Flynn and Adams’s studies of price and appreciation, and each answer says where its evidence stops: the paper at its centre tested no married couples.

The picks and their scores stand as they were.