Why No One Pays for Thanksgiving Dinner
Date Posted: December 7th, 2008
Chapter 4 of Dan Airely’s Predictably Irrational
You are at your mother-in-law’s house for Thanksgiving dinner, and what a sumptuous spread she has put on the table for you! The turkey is roasted to a golden brown; the stuffing is homemade and exactly the way you like it. Your kids are delighted: the sweet potatoes are crowned with marshmallows. And your wife is flattered: her favorite recipe for pumpkin pie has been chosen for dessert.
The festivities continue into the late afternoon. You loosen your belt and sip a glass of wine. Gazing fondly across the table at your mother-in-law, you rise to your feet and pull out your wallet. “Mom, for all the love you’ve put into this, how much do I owe you?” you say sincerely. As silence descends on the gathering, you have a handful of bills. “Do you think three hundred dollars will do it? No, wait, I should give you four hundred!”
This is not a picture that Norman Rockwell would have painted. A glass of wine falls over, your mother-in-law stands up red-faced; your sister-in-law shoots you an angry look; and your niece bursts into tears. Next year’s Thanksgiving celebration, it seems, may be a frozen dinner in front of the television set.
During the rest of the chapter he describes how “market forces”, meaning using money to pay for the value of something, and “social norms” like acting out of love or honor don’t mix. In this case attempting to pay for the socially priceless home-cooked Thanksgiving meal is a very bad idea.
I resonated (but not positively!) with the story because that’s exactly how my family would react, and this sort of situation usually makes me pretty angry. What is inherently wrong with putting a price on things? Is it because it’s actually priceless? Or is it because we’re just uncomfortable thinking about it? And more importantly why can’t we even talk about it without people getting defensive?
The origin of this tendency, methinks, may date back further in humanity’s history than we think. And because of that, “social norms” may feel more right than they really ought to.
Our Distant Relative the Chimpanzee
A few months ago I read Our Inner Ape
Sound familiar? If you help an acquaintance move his couch you expect that, barring extenuating circumstances, when you need to move your couch he’ll help out. But if it’s your best friend or sibling it feels like a different situation. When you help them out, you aren’t thinking of it as insurance that you’ll get help later. You’re doing it because that’s what you’re supposed to do.
The degrees of friendship between chimps are very similar to the degrees of friendship between humans. It’s pretty safe to assume then that this “social norm” (fluid relationships with kin and strict give and take with outsiders) has been around for a while and is deeply embedded in human society.
What does Money Have to Do With it?
Money is the ultimate expression that we’re dealing with strangers. It is the way we deal with strangers. When you go to a restaurant, you pay for the meal. The restaurant staff has metaphorically scratched your back by giving you food and a pleasant atmosphere, and you scratch theirs by paying for it with money. It’s not surprising then that we explicitly don’t want payment for hosting Thanksgiving. It effectively says that every member of your family is a stranger, which ends up being not only not true, but hurtful. Also, we want the opportunity to do favors for others without having to think about getting payment in return. If we reward family members and close friends with money we don’t get that opportunity.
So it’s that simple, right? Never let money change hands between close friends and family, at least not when it’s as a payment of services, because it sends the wrong message. But what about the cousin that never contributes? And what about the Uncle who believes that everyone should be paid for the value she creates?
The Freeloader and the Capitalist
As natural as it feels to have fluid relationships between family members and close friends, there’s a problem if we can’t talk to them when we’re feeling used. And when you’re strictly adhering to the unwritten rule that says that in these kind of relationships you don’t think about what you’ll get in return you’re kind of stuck. On the one hand you’re not supposed to keep score. On the other hand you feel as though you’re the only one contributing to the relationship. What do you do? Chances are the relationship will just deteriorate. After all, you can’t really defend yourself because any evidence you present will show that you’re keeping score, which is against the rules. Going along with “social norms” without acknowledging them as social norms will just lead misery for all parties in that relationship.
The capitalist is, I think, a rarer character in most families, but I’ll bring him up anyway because he’s in the Thanksgiving story. He’s the one who whips out his wallet and tries to quantify with cold, hard cash what a lovingly made home-cooked meal costs. Technically he isn’t actually doing anything wrong. In fact he’s quite generous, since an individual serving of Turkey and fixings at the local diner wouldn’t cost $400. But because he’s unwittingly calling his mother-in-law a stranger all hell breaks loose. He’s labeled a bad person and that’s the end of it. If this happened to my mother I know for a fact she’d never forget it.
So, clearly there are some negative consequences that come with following these unwritten social rules. Maybe the problem is with the social rules themselves. We’re a lot smarter than apes, right? Wouldn’t it just be better if we put away our apish past and embraces the simplicity that comes with being capitalists? You ought to know by know that the answer isn’t that simple.
How Do You Pay For Something That’s Priceless?
Paying for Thanksgiving is a problem because it’s supposed to be priceless. You’re not supposed to put a price on love, care, and affection and yet by attempting to pay for the meal you are indeed assigning a value to the meal if you give anything more than the cost of the materials. You’re saying that your mother-in-law’s time, love, care, and affection is worth $x to you. No matter how you cut it, that feels awful. It’s like paying for sex from your spouse or paying your kids to tell you they love you. It feels very very wrong.
But let’s just say that we got over the discomfort of assigning numerical values to “priceless” things. With enough practice we could distance ourselves such that numbers didn’t bother us anymore. It’s a stretch, but we could do it. What would happen? Maybe we’d all excitedly come up with how much money Thanksgiving was worth to us and each of us would pay the host. We could even have contests to improve the quality of the feast. Maybe we’d let our spouse know just how satisfying sex last night was by leaving a little extra money under his pillow. Maybe stay-at-home moms could actually get paid for the value they provided. Assuming we had enough of it to fully appreciate everyone, money could be a great way to let others know exactly what we think of them without having to use words.
Would we have altruism though? Would we have forgotten the wonderful feeling of having done something for someone without expecting payment? Would we have forgotten what it’s like to feel grateful and unable to express that feeling materially? Would we have lost something worth having?
To be honest I’m not sure how much we’d actually lose. I don’t know if getting over our attachment to money would necessarily mean that we wouldn’t be able to feel love and appreciation. Maybe it’s possible to assign prices to everything that we find valuable without unnecessarily hurting others. It could force us to come to terms with how valued we feel or don’t feel in a way that not assigning a price to such things doesn’t.
In any case, it’s unlikely that “social norms” are going to yield to the simplicity of capitalism any time soon. As mentioned already, these particular norms have been around for thousands of years. They’re hard to budge. And while getting used to applying prices to all aspects of our relationships with others may be useful in unwittingly getting us to talk about our issues, we don’t need that in order to talk about our issues.
The Ultimate Solution: Awareness and Patience
The problem with the freeloader is that you, the maligned family member, aren’t feeling satisfied with your relationship with him. Because of that the relationship has in effect temporarily downgraded from family–be it a close blood relative or a close friend–to acquaintance. In theory each member of a family should contribute to the relationship. The contribution won’t necessarily be equal since not all members are equal. For instance a child can’t do the same thing for an adult that another adult can for an adult, but that doesn’t mean that the child isn’t able to contribute. The important thing is that nobody feels like he’s being used. Once someone starts feeling that way he don’t feel like he’s part of a family anymore, thus effectively he isn’t part of a family anymore.
As an aside, I get that “as soon as someone within a family feels used he isn’t really part of a family anymore” is a strong statement. So think about this, what kind of person defines a family as a group of people in which some members use other members? No one. Usually the definition is something more like, “a group of people that help each other out.” There are probably more qualifiers than that, but in essence that’s the definition. As soon as someone feels used something is very very wrong.
So how do you deal with the freeloader? You make him aware that you’re feeling used and that you want to work with him so that you can feel positively about the relationship again. Applying “market forces” won’t fix the problem in the same way that contracts between spouses don’t fix the underlying problem. (See Harville Hendrix’s Keeping the Love You Find
Similarly if you come across a Capitalist in your family you have to be aware that her offering money for things you do freely doesn’t necessarily mean she thinks of you as a stranger. Better to look for other evidence to back up this claim before calling her out on it. Look for things like her not trusting you to do favors or her being very cautious about talking to you. And if you do call her out on it, have compassion because her not being trusting probably doesn’t have to do at all with you.
When we get into an argument with someone we need to be aware of what the situation really is. That in particular is what this post was really all about: two different situations (social norms and capitalism) that tend to get confused when put together causing explosive results. Neither thing is either good or bad. Mixing them doesn’t have to be bad thing. We just need to realize what that we need to take extra care when putting them together. Some people don’t realize what’s going on, and that just needs to be taken into account.
