Can Experience Gifts Bring You Closer? A Tale of Two Mugs
Start with what the recipient enjoys and can realistically use. When connection is part of the goal, the findings below give you a reason to consider an experience they actually want. Check the date, travel, and any extra costs it leaves them with. A physical gift can also invite an enjoyable experience.
For a movie fan, a cinema voucher they can easily redeem might fit. If they have asked for a particular coffee grinder, that request is useful guidance too: the object could become part of a morning they enjoy. These are editorial illustrations, not a head-to-head comparison tested in the paper. Checking preferences and logistics is practical advice, not an experimentally validated gift-selection checklist.
Imagine being given a mug. A good mug. A perfectly serviceable addition to the other perfectly serviceable mugs already occupying your cupboard.
Now imagine a researcher taking this small domestic event seriously enough to ask whether the words on the mug could change what it does for your relationship.
Cindy Chan and Cassie Mogilner did something close to that. Their research compared material gifts with gifts of experiences. In one experiment, they barely changed the object at all.
The mug had two jobs
The researchers recruited 200 gift givers and handed each a wrapped mug to give someone they knew. Givers were randomly assigned one of two versions. One said “my coffee mug.” The other said “my coffee time.”
One announced ownership of crockery. The other suggested there might be a pleasant few minutes attached.
The distinction was deliberate: an object to have versus an experience to enjoy. Of the recipients, 109 completed the survey. Those receiving the coffee-time version reported a greater strengthening of their relationship with the giver: an average of 7.47 rather than 6.92 on a nine-point scale. How much they liked the mugs did not differ significantly.
That is a small, self-reported difference, not evidence that a particular slogan improves every friendship. But it makes the usual gift debate a little less tidy. The choice need not always be between a physical thing and an outing. A physical thing can also invite an experience.
The mug, which had not been consulted about any of this, still held coffee.
You did not have to be there
The mug experiment changed how a material gift was framed. An earlier experiment in the same paper changed the kind of gift itself, sending people shopping for either an object or an experience. The researchers recruited 59 pairs of friends, assigned giver and recipient roles, and gave the buyers $15. Buyers were randomly told to choose either an experience or a material object.
There was one particularly useful restriction: recipients were supposed to use or enjoy their gifts without the giver, within a week. This helped test whether experiences could do more than simply put two friends in the same place for longer.
Forty-four recipients completed the follow-up, and one outlier was excluded from the analysis. Compared with recipients of objects, recipients of experiences reported a more positive change in relationship strength. Most had followed the instruction to enjoy the gift without the giver.
So the connection did not require the giver to sit beside the recipient, watching the gift produce its intended emotional return.
There is something gently relieving about that possibility. In our imagined birthday exchange, you can hand over the present and leave. You need not become its customer-satisfaction department.
What the wrapping cannot tell us
These experiments involved real gifts and real relationships, but their measurements were recipients’ reports. The shopping experiment followed people for only a week and lost a substantial share of recipients before that follow-up. It cannot tell us which gifts keep friends close years later, or whether a badly chosen experience beats an object somebody actually wants.
It also did not establish that romantic partners respond exactly like these friends. This is a study of giving and connection, not a way to convert a gift budget into a guaranteed relationship improvement.
What it offers is a different place to look. The giver sees the handover: the wrapping, the expression, the immediate thank-you. The recipient gets the part that happens afterward.
A mug can look entirely ordinary when it comes out of the box. Later, it may be involved in ten quiet minutes before anybody asks for anything. Liking that mug and feeling closer to its giver are distinct outcomes; this research measured both. No gift can promise the second. Before you buy, picture what the recipient will enjoy after the wrapping is gone, with you there or not.
The research
Cindy Chan and Cassie Mogilner. Experiential Gifts Foster Stronger Social Relationships Than Material Gifts. Journal of Consumer Research, 43(6), 913–931 (2017; published online in 2016).
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