When a Gift Becomes Barter

One way to reject a gift can be to reciprocate too quickly. When we do this, we are essentially saying that we don’t want any attachments to the person we are exchanging with. If you don’t trust the person who is giving you the gift, or you don’t want to be associated with that person, then immediate reciprocity could be a tactful way of communicating that.

What happens with immediate reciprocity is that it starts to look a lot more like barter. Firstly, it is clear that the reciprocated gift is tied to the gift being reciprocated, a connection that is more tenuous when there is a passage of time between the gifts. Secondly, the interaction is unmistakingly bilateral, another feature of barter. While this interaction is probably still gift-giving, the way in which it was executed helps to create an expectation of compensation in the mind of the giver.

It is a bit like clicker training with a dog. When a dog trainer is working with a dog, he may see a behavior he likes, such as sitting. When he sees that behavior, he marks it with the clicker and gives the dog a treat. The reason clicker training is so effective is because a) it associates the click with the reward, and b) the clicker enables the trainer to mark the precise moment that the behavior occurs. The dog then produces that behavior out of an expectation of reward. Likewise, a (mostly) undesired effect of immediate reciprocity is that it marks the gift, and helps to create the expectation of compensation in the mind of the receiver of the gift. Once this expectation has been created, the relationship may continue to use the language of gift-giving, but the gift has been polluted and the exchange may have transformed into barter.

Barter is not altogether bad, but it does have two undesired consequences. Barter, being an exchange of objects “with maximum feasible reduction of social, cultural, political, or personal transaction costs”¹, it doesn’t enrich the community in which it occurs in the same way gift-giving does. Also, the IRS considers barter to be a form of taxable income², so it is hardly the exit from the market economy that some of us might envision it to be.