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Why we buy bad gifts for the ones we love most

Culture News Account |
Each holiday season, another woman who loves the rock band No Doubt will receive a plaid skirt that only the band's singer, Gwen Stefani, could pull off. Another athletic guy will receive an oversize sports jersey – even though off the field he prefers Brooks Brothers. Why are we so terrible at predicting the tastes of the ones we love? A new study explains why familiarity with another person actually makes predicting their tastes more difficult. Past research has argued that lack of diagnostic information causes this sort of misperception, but Davy Lerouge (Tilburg University, the…
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