Gift won’t arrive in time for the holidays? Psychologists say your friends won’t really care

It’s gift-giving season, which means making long shopping lists, wondering if anyone will care about receiving scented candles two years in a row, and panicking about long lines at the post office.

But this year, a new study published in the Journal of Consumer Psychology has some good news for procrastinators. While it’s unclear how recipients will feel about those scented candles, research shows that sending gifts follows the age-old expression: “Better late than never.”

The researchers ran several different studies surveying hundreds of participants on different scenarios. In the first study, participants were asked to imagine their friend gave them a birthday gift on time or two weeks late, or to imagine that they had given their friend a gift on time or two weeks late. The researchers found people who imagined giving a gift late estimated it would cause more harm to the relationship than people who imagined receiving a gift late.

In the second study, participants were asked to imagine giving or receiving a gift late, and how much that would influence their perception of care in the relationship. Researchers found that the gift givers overestimated the harm of giving a gift late because they believed it signals a lack of care about the relationship.

In the third study, participants were asked to imagine giving or receiving a gift late—however, in some conditions, the gift required significant effort to put together, and in others, it was low effort. Researchers found that gift givers who imagined putting in more effort expected there would be less of a negative reaction to a late gift. While this proved to be true for gift recipients, givers again overestimated how much harm a late gift would cause.

In the fourth study, the researchers tested how much the degree of lateness matters by asking people to imagine giving and receiving a gift on time, two days late, two weeks late, or two months late. In general, recipients said harm to the relationship was roughly the same whether a gift was two days late or two weeks late, but it was slightly higher if it was two months late. However, gift givers estimated harm to be much higher in all the late conditions, and it increased substantially as the gift got later and later.

In the last study, researchers tested whether it was best to send a gift late or not at all. Participants were asked to imagine either giving a gift on time, two months late, or not at all, or to imagine receiving a gift under one of those three conditions. Once again, gift givers overestimated the harm of being late or not sending a gift. However, recipients felt that it was more harmful to the relationship to not get a gift at all than to get one late.

“Our work . . . suggests that sending a gift late will result in fewer giver worries about the state of the relationship than not sending a gift simply because it is going to be late,” the researchers wrote.