The Relationship between Chinese Vanity and Gift-giving Behaviors

Gift-giving is a common behavior in interpersonal interaction. In Chinese society, people usually give a gift to others in a particularistic way. In the other words, Chinese people would choose distinct gifts on the basis of relationship types and relationship closeness. Moreover, Vanity individuals prefer to buy the products which are on-trend and positive comments by the masses. In this research, we attempted to explore whether vanity individuals would choose fashionable or high-class products in gift-giving situations or not. There are two studies to explore the relationship between vanity and gift-giving behaviors in Taiwanese context. In the first study, we analyzed Chinese adjectives and Chinese proverbs to grasp the meaning of vanity and found that there were three theoretical concepts: achievement vanity, appearance vanity, and interpersonal vanity. Based on the theoretical concepts, we wrote 80 items to develop a preliminary version of Chinese vanity inventory and recruited 605 Taiwanese by internet survey platform. After exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis, there were 50 items in the final version of Chinese vanity inventory which derived four factors: plutocrat vanity, appearance vanity, supremacy vanity, and popularity vanity. In the second study, we tried to find out the relationships between vanity trait and gift-giving behaviors. A total of 1,070 participants were recruited through a web-based survey. The questionnaires assessed their vanity traits, gift-giving behavior and consumption behaviors for oneself. Results indicated that participants with high appearance vanity would buy high-class products as the presents. Besides, participants with high appearance vanity and supremacy vanity would buy high-class products for oneself. The cultural implication of Chinese vanity and gift-giving behaviors were discussed.