Why You Shouldn’t Try to Pay Mom-In-Law for Thanksgiving
Date Posted: December 2nd, 2010
This is an update of a post I wrote 2 years ago. I keep wanting to link to it because the content is good, but since I’d just started writing for the blog the presentation was…uh… less than perfect. Below is an attempt to improve it.
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”–using money to pay for the value of something–and “social norms”–acting out of love or honor–don’t mix. In this case, attempting to pay your mother-in-law for her socially priceless home-cooked Thanksgiving meal is a very bad idea.
This story struck a nerve. I could easily envision my family reacting this way, and it’s the kind of thing that bothers me. What’s inherently wrong with putting a price on Thanksgiving? Is it actually priceless? Why are we uncomfortable thinking about it? It doesn’t make any sense.
Our Distant Relative the Chimpanzee
A few months years ago I read Frans de Waal’s Our Inner Ape
We experience the same thing all the time. If you help an acquaintance move his couch you expect that, barring extenuating circumstances, when you need to move your couch he’ll help you 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. Because it feels right.
As a rule, these sort of evolutionarily acquired behaviors show up as instinctive feelings. Fight or flight is a good example. Parental attachment to children is another. So it makes sense that we feel uncomfortable when our close friends keep score of favors. It’s instinctive.
How does this relate to Thanksgiving at your mother-in-law’s? I’m getting to that. First we have to talk about money.
What does Money Have to Do With it?
It’s just about impossible to fit money into social norms… for a number of reasons:
- It’s too neat. Reciprocity is instant. The score is always even.
- Most of us don’t have the means to pay for the gifts we are given. If you calculate how much you’d have to pay at a restaurant for the quality of a well cooked home-made meal… it’d be a lot. A multi-course holiday feast would be even more. Or how about getting help moving across town? Professional movers are expensive! If we had to pay for our friends’ services, many of us wouldn’t be able to afford it. And if you added to that a tip for them doing it without expecting to get paid… yeah.
- Putting a price on a gift given lovingly taints it. It’s gone from “gift” to “product to be purchased”. Doesn’t matter if you were generous with how much you thought it was worth, it’s still tainted. We don’t like it when someone tries to buy our love. It feels icky and wrong. You have to give a very convincing explanation to have money taken as a token of appreciation instead of a form of payment.
- Giving money says “You are a stranger.” When you go to a restaurant, you pay for the meal. The restaurant staff has scratched your back by giving you food and a pleasant atmosphere, and you scratch theirs by paying for the service with money. The restaurant owner, presumably, provided you with the meal primarily so he could get paid. You paid for it so you could complete the transaction as quickly as possible. Money is how mutually beneficial transactions between strangers happen.
Going back to Thanksgiving at Mom-in-Law’s, she got pissed that you tried to pay her because she felt she was being treated as a stranger, someone who can be paid off and never thought of again. And she thought you were trying to buy the gift she gave you out of love. Sure, you didn’t mean it like that, but her flipping out was instinctive.
So that’s why no one pays for Thanksgiving. Of course, Thanksgiving is a contrived example since most of us weren’t planning to pay Mom-in-Law in the first place, but this “you don’t pay family for favors” thing has other everyday implications…
