Pottery Will Get You Nowhere

My boyfriend and I are attending a wedding next month, and he wants to buy the bride and groom a gift from their registry. However, I recently got into handmade pottery and thought it would be much more special to make a personalized gift -- something totally unique, like a ceramic honey pot. Besides displaying our creativity more, it'd be cheaper, and there would be no shipping charges.

--Crafty

A handmade ceramic honey pot seems like the obvious best gift -- if the happy couple are Martha Stewart and Winnie-the-Pooh. I, too, used to turn my nose up at gift registries, which I thought were a tool for the lazy and uncreative. It does seem that being a truly caring friend means putting real effort into gift giving, like by spending six months crocheting a couple an afghan out of cat hair rather than just rolling out of bed and mouse-clicking on something they've registered for at Bed Bath & Be-yawned. But two business school professors, Francesca Gino and Francis Flynn, did a series of experiments to find out whether this is true. Lo and behold, they learned that gift recipients actually preferred the gifts they'd registered for, appreciating them more and finding them more thoughtful and even more personal. (Gift givers assumed the opposite to be true.) The gift givers' mistaken assumption seems to stem from what another researcher, Adam Grant, describes in his terrific book, "Give and Take," as a "perspective gap." We tend to interpret what another person would want by asking "What would I want?" rather than what would get us to the right answer: "What would THEY want?" In other words, though your pottery efforts may far surpass the artfulness of my macaroni assemblages, your boyfriend is probably on the right track in sticking with the registry. So, keep on potting, but get them that monogrammed garlic press they say they want instead of what you want them to want: for you to save money on a gift and not have to pay for shipping.