You Don’t Like the Gift. You Never Use It. But You Still Can’t Throw It Away – Research Reveals the Surprising Reasons Why, and What Actually Helps

Do you have an object at home you just can’t bring yourself to throw away, no matter how many times you declutter, put things in order, fill bags with things to donate, or decide it’s finally time for a garage sale?

I think many of you do. I know I do.

And apparently, we’re far from alone. A new global IKEA study found that 82% of people keep things for sentimental reasons, even when they rarely use them or keep them out of sight.

Isn’t that fascinating?

For me, that was the part of the study that sent me down a rabbit hole. I started looking into why we keep things we don’t use – and, in the case of gifts, sometimes don’t even like – and discovered that we don’t all keep them for the same reason. Yes, there are studies about that too.

But what I found even more interesting was what happens when researchers compare what we think the person who gave us an unwanted gift would feel if we regifted it with how gift givers actually say they would react.

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The difference isn’t quite what I expected.

And once I started reading about that, one study led to another: why disliked gifts end up sitting in storage, why something we don’t like can still become connected to a person we love, why close friends can sometimes choose worse gifts precisely because they think they know us so well, and why an object can become much harder to give away years after we received it.

I learned so many interesting things that I decided to gather them all here – because that unwanted gift sitting somewhere in your house may have a much more complicated story than you think.

An Unwanted Gift Isn’t Just Another Object

The new IKEA study included 31,488 people across 31 markets, and while it wasn’t specifically about gifts, its findings show just how strongly we can become attached to things we aren’t actually using. The study found that 82% of people keep things for sentimental reasons, even when they rarely use them or keep them out of sight.

Of course, things get more complicated when we talk about gifts because two people are attached to the object.

You aren’t only deciding whether you still want a lamp, scarf, coffee mug, kitchen gadget or decorative object. You may find yourself thinking about who chose it, why they chose it, whether they spent a lot of money on it, whether they’ll ever ask about it, whether they’ll notice it missing when they visit, and what getting rid of it might say about your feelings toward them.

Gift giving comes with all kinds of unspoken social rules. We say thank you even when a present misses the mark. We generally try not to show disappointment. And we understand that someone can choose a gift with the best intentions and still choose something we would never have bought for ourselves.

The harder part can come later, when the giver has gone home, and the unwanted gift is still there.

Researchers Studied What People Actually Do With Gifts They Don’t Like

Yes, there is a study for this. One study examined what 958 adults did with gifts they didn’t like, and the most common response wasn’t using, selling, or getting rid of them.

It was storing them. In other words, the gift remains somewhere in the home, even though it may play little role in the recipient’s everyday life.

The researchers also found that what eventually happened to a disliked gift was related to several factors, including how much it was believed to have cost, how long ago it had been received, whether it had ever been used and, importantly, how the gift affected the relationship between the giver and recipient.

An earlier study of 1,269 adults also examined what people do with gifts they dislike, and the dilemma recipients face when deciding whether to use them.

Both studies were conducted in Ecuador, so I am not generalizing it as a universal percentage or behavioral pattern. But the central behavior is easy to recognize.

You don’t wear it.

You don’t display it.

You don’t really want it.

But somehow, you still haven’t given yourself permission to get rid of it.

Sometimes Keeping a Bad Gift Is Really About Protecting the Relationship

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Another study gets even closer to what happens emotionally when someone gives us something we don’t want.

In 2020, researchers examined what they called “failed gift experiences”. Their research included questionnaires, online diaries and 27 in-depth interviews.

They found that recipients used three broad ways of coping with a gift that had gone wrong: concealing, disclosing and re-evaluating.

Concealing will probably sound very familiar. Someone gives you something you really don’t like, but instead of saying exactly what you’re thinking, you smile, thank them and try not to let your disappointment show.

That reaction isn’t difficult to understand. You may dislike the gift while still appreciating the person, the effort, and the intention behind it.

The problem is that the social moment doesn’t necessarily end when you finish unwrapping the present. If you tried hard not to hurt the giver’s feelings when you received it, getting rid of it later can still feel as though you’re doing something hurtful behind their back.

The object ends up carrying two completely different messages:

I don’t want this.

And:

I care about the person who gave it to me.

Those thoughts can exist perfectly well together, but our emotions don’t always keep them neatly separated.

A Physical Gift Can Become a Reminder of the Person Who Gave It to You

Objects are remarkably good at turning into memory triggers. I’ve seen this with fridge magnets and travel souvenirs. Something small and inexpensive can suddenly bring back a place, a holiday, the people we were with and details we hadn’t consciously thought about in years.

Gift researchers have found something interesting from the giver’s side too.

A 2022 study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology included six experiments with 2,350 participants. Researchers found that gift givers preferred giving material gifts more than recipients preferred receiving them.

One explanation they found was what the researchers called a mnemonic gifting strategy. Put more simply, people can choose physical gifts partly because the object can help the recipient remember them.

And when you think about the objects in your own home, that doesn’t sound strange at all. A mug stops being just a mug and becomes “the mug Anna gave me.”

A necklace becomes “the necklace Dad bought me.”

A Christmas ornament becomes “the ornament Grandma gave us when we moved.”

Even an object you don’t like very much can acquire a completely different value because of where – and who – it came from. 

This happens to me a lot – because each mug has a special story – it is bought on a specific trip or a gift from my husband or friends. The same thing happens with notebooks, pens… should I continue?

Then Researchers Asked What Happens If You Regift It

This is where things became much more interesting for me. Gabrielle Adams, Francis Flynn and Michael Norton conducted five studies on regifting, published in Psychological Science.

They wanted to know whether original gift givers are really as offended by regifting as recipients think they will be. And there was a considerable difference between the two sides.

Recipients expected original givers to be more offended by regifting than the givers themselves said they would be.

But the researchers went one step further.

They compared reactions to regifting the present with reactions to simply throwing the present away.

Recipients tended to think the giver would see the two actions as similarly offensive.

Think about that for a moment. From the recipient’s point of view, giving an unwanted present to somebody who might actually enjoy it could feel almost as bad as throwing it in the trash.

The original givers did not see it that way. They preferred having the gift regifted rather than thrown away.

The Giver May Think You Have More Freedom Than You Think You Do

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The researchers found an explanation in something they described as entitlement. Once someone had given the present away, givers tended to feel that ownership had transferred to the recipient.

The gift now belonged to them – the recipient could decide what to do with it.

Recipients were more likely to behave as though the original giver still had some say over the object’s future. Yes, the difference is subtle, but it is important nonetheless. 

The giver may be thinking, “It’s yours now.”

The recipient may still be thinking, “But you gave it to me.”

And because we usually don’t ask someone directly, “Would you be upset if I gave your gift to somebody else?”, we fill in the missing answer ourselves. We’re not always very good at predicting other people’s reactions. I’ve covered a similar mismatch in research about whether you should tell someone something embarrassing: what we imagine another person’s reaction will be isn’t necessarily what that person actually wants from us.

Plenty of other psychological biases also influence our decisions, especially when we’re trying to make judgments without all the information.  

Close Friends Can Choose the Wrong Gift Because They Think They Know You So Well

Here’s another part of the research I didn’t expect.

Researchers Morgan Ward and Susan Broniarczyk used gift registries to study how close and more distant gift givers choose presents.

Across five studies, close gift givers were more likely than distant givers to move away from items the recipient had specifically requested when their gift choice could be attributed to them.

The reason wasn’t that they didn’t care what the recipient wanted. In fact, it is quite the opposite.

They wanted their choice to say something about the relationship. Choosing something themselves could demonstrate, at least in their minds, that they knew the recipient well enough to find something more personal.

The more distant givers were more likely to stick to the registry.

So someone close to you can end up choosing something you want less precisely because they’re trying harder to show how well they know you.

If you’ve ever opened a present from someone who knows you extremely well and wondered how they possibly arrived at that choice, apparently there may be some psychology behind it.

It also makes getting rid of the unwanted gift harder. You may dislike the object while knowing how much thought the other person put into choosing it.

Who Gave You the Gift Can Change What You Do With It

Another study compared attitudes toward disliked gifts from close and more distant people. The research involved American and Thai participants and looked at whether recipients used, stored, donated, or disposed of unwanted gifts. 

The researchers found that relationship closeness mattered, along with cultural differences in how independently or interdependently people viewed themselves. Among the patterns they found, people with stronger interdependent tendencies were less inclined to dispose of unwanted gifts received from someone close to them and more inclined to use or store them.

The study involved many university students, so it’s not a universal rule, but it reinforces something that keeps appearing throughout this research:

what we do with a gift isn’t determined only by what we think of the object.

Who gave it to us matters too.

A Gift Can Become Harder to Give Away Years Later

Oh, yes, there’s one more complication. The gift you disliked when you received it and the object sitting in your cupboard ten years later aren’t necessarily emotionally identical anymore.

Time can add something to it: the object may become tied to a period of your life, an old home, a birthday, a family tradition or someone you no longer see very often. Researchers Karen Page Winterich, Rebecca Walker Reczek, and Julie Irwin studied why people struggle to donate possessions with sentimental value.

Their work wasn’t specifically about unwanted gifts, but it’s relevant to what can happen to a gift after years of ownership. They found that parting with sentimental possessions can produce a sense of identity loss.

And in one field study, people who were encouraged to photograph sentimental possessions before donating them donated more. The photograph helped preserve the memory attached to the possession, making it easier to separate the memory from the physical object.

I think that’s an important distinction: keeping something because you’re afraid the original giver will be offended isn’t the same as keeping it because, after all these years, the object itself has become part of your memories.

So Why Do We Keep Gifts We Don’t Even Like?

After all this research, there clearly isn’t one answer.

You may be keeping the gift because you don’t want to hurt the giver.

You may feel that throwing it away wastes their money or effort.

You may believe the giver still has some claim over what happens to it, even though research suggests givers themselves may feel that ownership transferred completely when they handed it to you.

You may associate the object with the person.

Or the gift may have accumulated enough memories over the years that you now value it for reasons that have very little to do with whether you originally liked it.

And sometimes several of those reasons are happening at once.

You can dislike the vase, appreciate the person who gave you the vase, remember the birthday when they gave it to you, feel bad about wasting their money and still have absolutely no desire to put the vase anywhere in your home.

If You Want to Get Rid of It, Ask Yourself What You’re Actually Keeping

One question may help separate the object from everything attached to it:

If this exact same object hadn’t been given to me by this person, would I still keep it?

If the answer is yes, then perhaps you actually value the object now. If the answer is no, the more useful question becomes what you believe you’re preserving by keeping it.

If You’re Keeping the Memory

Research on sentimental possessions offers one practical option: photograph the object before letting it go.

You keep a visual reminder and the story behind it without keeping every physical possession connected to that story.

If You’re Keeping It Because You’re Afraid of Hurting Someone

Recipients predicted more offense than original givers reported, and givers clearly preferred regifting to throwing an unwanted present away.

Of course, you know the person who gave you the gift better than a study does. Some people remember everything they’ve given, ask where something is years later, or would genuinely be upset to discover it was passed on.

But if the only reason the object is still in your home is a reaction you’ve imagined rather than one the giver has ever expressed, the research suggests that imagined reaction may be stronger than the real one.

If Someone Else Would Actually Like It

A perfectly good object doesn’t become more useful by sitting untouched at the back of a cupboard.

Regifting, donating or selling it can put it in the hands of someone who actually wants it.

Of course, not every gift is a good candidate for regifting. Something extremely personal, customized, damaged or obviously chosen specifically for you is different from an unopened beauty product, a book, a kitchen appliance, a decorative item or something you know another person would genuinely enjoy.

There Is Something Here for Gift Givers Too

If you’re choosing a present for someone, research on close relationships offers a useful warning. Knowing someone well doesn’t necessarily mean we know better than they do what they want. A wish list isn’t automatically less thoughtful than ignoring the list and trying to surprise them. Sometimes giving people what they actually asked for is the more thoughtful choice.

And if someone already owns plenty of physical things, another object isn’t your only option. Depending on the person, a meal, concert, class, day out or travel experience can create a memory without adding another item that needs somewhere to live.

Perhaps the regifting research offers one more useful idea for givers too. Once we’ve given something away, allowing the other person to decide what happens to it may be part of the gift.

Conclusion: Sometimes We’re Keeping the Person, Not the Present

That vase sitting in a cupboard for eight years may look like an object you simply forgot to get rid of.

The research suggests the story can be much more complicated.

Studies of disliked gifts have found that storing them is common. Research into failed gifts shows how much our decisions can be tied to protecting relationships. Studies of regifting found that recipients expect more offense than givers themselves report. Other research shows that the identity of the giver, the closeness of the relationship and the memories attached to an object can all influence what eventually happens to it.

And perhaps that’s why a gift can survive one decluttering session after another. We aren’t always deciding whether to keep a vase, sweater, mug, or decorative object. Sometimes, somewhere in our minds, we’re deciding what keeping or discarding it says about the person who gave it to us. The interesting part is that they may not be making the same connection at all.

Frequently Asked Questions About Unwanted Gifts

Why do I feel guilty getting rid of a gift I don’t like?

You may associate getting rid of the gift with rejecting the giver, wasting their money or dismissing the effort they made. Research on regifting also suggests recipients can feel that original givers retain more say over what happens to a gift than givers themselves believe they do.

Why do people keep gifts they never use?

Research on disliked gifts has found that storage is a common response. The relationship with the giver, the perceived value of the gift, guilt, social expectations and sentimental meaning can all influence whether someone keeps an unwanted present.

Is it rude to regift something?

It depends on the circumstances and the people involved, but experimental research found that recipients tended to predict more offense than original gift givers actually reported. Givers in those studies also preferred having an unwanted gift regifted rather than thrown away.

Can you dislike a gift but still feel attached to it?

Yes. You can dislike the object itself while valuing the person who gave it to you, the occasion when you received it or the memories it has accumulated over time.

Does photographing a sentimental object make it easier to get rid of it?

Research published in the Journal of Marketing found that encouraging people to photograph sentimental possessions before donating them increased donations. Preserving the memory helped reduce the sense of identity loss associated with giving up the physical possession.

Do gift givers care what happens to their gifts?

Individual reactions vary, but research comparing givers and recipients found that recipients expected regifting to cause more offense than original gift givers reported. Givers were more likely to see the recipient as having full ownership once the gift had been given.

Violeta Loredana

Violeta-Loredana Pascal is a communications expert, business mentor, and the founder of Earth’s Attractions and PRwave INTERNATIONAL. A pioneer in the Romanian digital PR landscape since 2005, she holds a degree in Communication and Social Sciences from SNSPA Bucharest. Violeta is a senior trainer at AcademiadeAfaceri.ro, where she leverages over 20 years of experience to teach professional courses in PR strategy and workplace productivity. By blending high-level business consulting with a passion for holistic travel and wellness, she empowers solopreneurs to overcome procrastination, build profitable brands, and design a life of purposeful adventure.