A Holiday Gift Card Ethics Test
By: Craig Kohtz
Tags: Happiness, Beyourself, Psychology, Ethics

A Holiday Gift Card Ethics Test

This holiday season, a friend of mine presented me with an ethical question. It was a fun little thought experiment that had me thinking about right from wrong and a rule of thumb for deciding what is right.

My friend had collected money from people at work to buy a gift certificate for a co-worker from a local restaurant. When she bought the gift certificate, the restaurant gave her a bonus $20 gift card. Because she was alone, she was the only one who knows about the gift card. She texted me and said, “You seem like an ethical guy, what would you do with the gift card? Should I keep it? Add it to the gift? Or pay it forward?” Here is how I went about analyzing the problem.

If she kept the gift certificate for herself, would that be unethical? She did spend her own time and money by going to the restaurant to buy the gift certificates. Nobody would know that a bonus gift certificate was given to her so nobody would be harmed. She could look at it as compensation for her efforts. On the surface, it doesn’t seem unethical but I really had to rationalize why it was not wrong, which means it probably was not right.

On the other hand, if she added the gift certificate to the existing gift, it might make the person receiving the gift marginally happier. And she could tell everyone that the money they spent went further than they had anticipated, making her coworkers marginally happier as well. This option is definitely not wrong, but what about the third option?

The third option was to pay it forward — giving the bonus gift certificate to a random stranger. The person receiving the initial gift is still happy as nothing is taken from them, the coworker's expectations are still met, but someone out in the world gets to receive a random, unexpected act of kindness.

I think the first two options are appealing because we live in a very consumer-based culture. So many of us spend our lives on what psychologists call the “hedonic treadmill”. We all have a base level of happiness. We look for things that we think will make us happy — a new car, a new computer, travel—but once we obtain these things, we are only happier for a short amount of time before our happiness comes back down to that base level. But we like the happiness high so we try again. And again, and again, constantly trying to find the next thing that will make us happy.

Keeping the gift certificate for ourselves fits within that paradigm. If we keep the gift certificate, it will make us happy because we are used to things making us happy. It also fits well with the second option of adding it to the original gift. If some stuff makes the recipient happy, a little more stuff will make them a little happier.

This kind of happiness is only temporary. It’s a quick hit of happiness that doesn’t stick around for long. Just because something makes us happy, doesn’t make it right.

So why would giving it to an unsuspecting stranger be the best option?

As a species, we survived and prospered in part because we were able to form communities. It is much easier to survive as a group than it is to survive alone. It is easier to find food, it is easier to build shelter, and it is easier to defend against predators. Some speculate this is why rejection triggers the same parts of the brain that cause physical pain and the reason why Tylenol can actually lessen the pain of rejection. It may also be why feelings of loneliness can shorten our lives by similar lengths as being obese or smoking. We need others to survive and have evolved to be extremely sensitive to rejection.

So, it makes sense that the opposite is also true.

If being alone or rejected from our community can make us miserable, then it makes sense that being of benefit to our community or useful to someone else can give us a true sense of self-worth. Having a sense of self-worth can have a much more dramatic effect on our wellbeing and happiness than a dopamine hit from getting new stuff.

It’s why I have to choke back a tear in Elf when Walter choose his son over his job, despite it being an otherwise ridiculous (yet hilarious) movie. Or why I cry in my truck when my local radio station does their “random acts of kindness” every year where they give friends of the show money and have them give it away to strangers or people they think to deserve it. Helping others matters.

So my rule of thumb is if presented with a choice between benefiting myself or someone else chooses someone else. Easy. Even if you can rationalize your other choices, choosing to benefit someone else has the added benefit of maximizing self-worth, which is a much better option than a dopamine high.

Ultimately my friend chose to pay it forward and gave the gift certificate (and some cookies) to someone who wasn’t expecting it. She was expanding her usefulness to the community and more people benefited in the end, including her.