Abstract
We suggest that the psychology of ownership encompasses much more than feelings of ownership and includes much of “legal” ownership. To make our case, we review ownership in young children. We review findings showing that young children are aware of the ownership status of objects and of people’s ownership rights, which are both parts of “legal ownership” and have little to do with feelings of ownership. We also review findings showing that young children use ownership to understand other people and consider ownership when predicting how others will act, anticipating how they feel, and inferring their preferences. Because these ways of understanding others are basic psychological activities, these findings again suggest that aspects of “legal” ownership are psychological.
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Notes
- 1.
This may sound similar to the claim that children infer ownership from first possession. However, different principles may operate depending on whether children are considering an object that is already owned or one that was recently acquired and has just become owned.
- 2.
The findings can also be interpreted as showing that children did not expect the girl to empathize with the owner of the other bear, given that they predicted the girl would be happy when it was gone. But this finding is open to other interpretations. For example, perhaps children anticipated that the girl would be happy from relief that her teddy bear was still there.
- 3.
As such, this finding also suggests that children as young as age two probably have an understanding of other people’s ownership rights. However, this conclusion is tentative because no other studies have found an awareness of others’ ownership rights in children younger than age three.
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Friedman, O., Pesowski, M.L., Goulding, B.W. (2018). Legal Ownership Is Psychological: Evidence from Young Children. In: Peck, J., Shu, S. (eds) Psychological Ownership and Consumer Behavior. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77158-8_2
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