Although people own myriad objects, land, and even ideas, it is currently illegal to own other humans. This reluctance to view people as property raises interesting questions about our conceptions of people and about our conceptions of ownership. We suggest that one factor contributing to this reluctance is that humans are normally considered to be autonomous, and autonomy is incompatible with being owned by someone else. To investigate whether autonomy impacts judgments of ownership, participants recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk read (...) vignettes where a person paid for an entity or created it. Participants were less likely to judge that the entity was owned when it was described as autonomous compared with when it was described as non-autonomous, and this pattern held regardless of whether the entity was a human or an alien, a robot, or a human-like biological creation. The effect of autonomy was specific to judgments of whether entities were owned, and it did not influence judgments of the moral acceptability of paying for and keeping entities. These experiments also found that judgments of ownership were separately impacted by ontological type, with participants less likely to judge that humans are owned compared with other kinds of entities. A fourth experiment tested a further prediction of the autonomy account, and showed that participants are more likely to view a person as owned if he willingly sells himself. Together these findings show that attributions of autonomy constrain judgments of what can be owned. 2017 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Young children show competence in reasoning about how ownership affects object use. In the present experiments, we investigate how influential ownership is for young children by examining their explanations. In three experiments, we asked 3- to 5-year-olds to explain why it was acceptable or unacceptable for a person to use an object. In Experiments 1 and 2, older preschoolers referenced ownership more than alternative considerations when explaining why it was acceptable or unacceptable for a person to use an object, even (...) though ownership was not mentioned to them. In Experiment 3, ownership was mentioned to children. Here, younger preschoolers frequently referenced ownership when explaining unacceptability of using an object, but not when explaining why using it was acceptable. These findings suggest that ownership is influential in preschoolers' explanations about the acceptability of using objects, but that the scope of its influence increases with age. (shrink)

A chapter reviewing recent experimental work on people's conceptions of ownership rights.

Humans have attained an unparalleled level of sophistication when engaging in collaborative and cooperative activities. Remarkably, the skills and motivation to engage in complex forms of collaboration and cooperation seem to emerge early on during infancy and childhood. In this paper, I extensively review the literature on the evolution and development of human cooperation, emphasizing important aspects of inter-cultural variation in collaborative and cooperative behaviour. This will not only allow us to confront the different evolutionary scenarios in which cooperation may (...) have emerged, but will especially provide the reader with a first orientation in the abundant literature on human cooperation. (shrink)

We sometimes violate social norms in order to express our views and to trigger public debates. Many extant accounts of social norms don’t give us any insight into this phenomenon. Drawing on Cristina Bicchieri’s work, I am putting forward an empirical hypothesis that helps us to understand such norm violations. The hypothesis says, roughly, that we often adhere to norms because we are systematically blind to norm-violating options. I argue that this hypothesis is independently plausible and has interesting consequences. It (...) implies, e.g., that some experimental paradigms for investigating social norms have hitherto unnoticed shortcomings. (shrink)

Human social life is structured by social norms creating both obligations and entitlements. Recent research has found that young children enforce simple obligations against norm violators by protesting. It is not known, however, whether they understand entitlements in the sense that they will actively object to a second party attempting to interfere in something that a third party is entitled to do — what we call counter-protest. In two studies, we found that 3-year-old children understand when a person is entitled (...) to do something, and so they actively defend this person’s entitlement against unjustified interference from second parties. In some cases, they even enforce second-order entitlements, for example, in the case of ownership where an owner is entitled to entitle others to use the owner’s property. (shrink)

The fact that humans cooperate with nonkin is something we take for granted, but this is an anomaly in the animal kingdom. Our species’ ability to behave prosocially may be based on human-unique psychological mechanisms. We argue here that these mechanisms include the ability to care about the welfare of others (other-regarding concerns), to “feel into” others (empathy), and to understand, adhere to, and enforce social norms (normativity). We consider how these motivational, emotional, and normative substrates of prosociality develop in (...) childhood and emerged in our evolutionary history. Moreover, we suggest that these three mechanisms all serve the critical function of aligning individuals with others: Empathy and other-regarding concerns align individuals with one another, and norms align individuals with their group. Such alignment allows us to engage in the kind of large-scale cooperation seen uniquely in humans. (shrink)

Understanding ownership rights is necessary for socially appropriate behavior. We provide evidence that preschoolers' and adults' judgments of ownership rights are related to their judgments of bodily rights. Four-year-olds and adults evaluated the acceptability of harmless actions targeting owned property and body parts. At both ages, evaluations did not vary for owned property or body parts. Instead, evaluations were influenced by two other manipulations—whether the target belonged to the agent or another person, and whether that other person approved of the (...) action. Moreover, these manipulations influenced judgments for owned objects and body parts in the same way: When the other person approved of the action, participants' judgments were positive regardless of who the target belonged to. In contrast, when that person disapproved, judgments depended on who the target belonged to. These findings show that young children grasp the importance of approval or consent for ownership rights and bodily rights, and likewise suggest that people's notions of ownership rights are related to their appreciation of bodily rights. (shrink)

Psychological essentialism is an intuitive folk belief positing that certain categories have a non-obvious inner “essence” that gives rise to observable features. Although this belief most commonly characterizes natural kind categories, I argue that psychological essentialism can also be extended in important ways to artifact concepts. Specifically, concepts of individual artifacts include the non-obvious feature of object history, which is evident when making judgments regarding authenticity and ownership. Classic examples include famous works of art (e.g., the Mona Lisa is authentic (...) because of its provenance), but ordinary artifacts likewise receive value from their history (e.g., a worn and tattered blanket may have special value if it was one’s childhood possession). Moreover, in some cases, object history may be thought to have causal effects on individual artifacts, much as an animal essence has causal effects. I review empirical support for these claims and consider the implications for both artifact concepts and essentialism. This perspective suggests that artifact concepts cannot be contained in a theoretical framework that focuses exclusively on similarity or even function. Furthermore, although there are significant differences between essentialism of natural kinds and essentialism of artifact individuals, the commonalities suggest that psychological essentialism may not derive from folk biology but instead may reflect more domain-general perspectives on the world. (shrink)

Cognitive Science, Volume 45, Issue 11, November 2021.

People often judge it unacceptable to directly harm a person, even when this is necessary to produce an overall positive outcome, such as saving five other lives. We demonstrate that similar judgments arise when people consider damage to owned objects. In two experiments, participants considered dilemmas where saving five inanimate objects required destroying one. Participants judged this unacceptable when it required violating another’s ownership rights, but not otherwise. They also judged that sacrificing another’s object was less acceptable as a means (...) than as a side-effect; judgments did not depend on whether property damage involved personal force. These findings inform theories of moral decision-making. They show that utilitarian judgment can be decreased without physical harm to persons, and without personal force. The findings also show that the distinction between means and side-effects influences the acceptability of damaging objects, and that ownership impacts utilitarian moral judgment. (shrink)

Adults apply ownership not only to objects but also to ideas. But do people come to apply principles of ownership to ideas because of being taught about intellectual property and copyrights? Here, we investigate whether children apply rules from physical property ownership to ideas. Studies 1a and 1b show that children (6–8 years old) determine ownership of both objects and ideas based on who first establishes possession of the object or idea. Study 2 shows that children use another principle of (...) object ownership, control of permission—an ability to restrict others’ access to the entity in question—to determine idea ownership. In Study 3, we replicate these findings with different idea types. In Study 4, we determine that children will not apply ownership to every entity, demonstrating that they do not apply ownership to a common word. Taken together, these results suggest that, like adults, children as young as 6 years old apply rules from ownership not only to objects but to ideas as well. (shrink)

Young children often treat robots as social agents after they have witnessed interactions that can be interpreted as social. We studied in three experiments whether four-year-olds from three cultures and adults from two cultures will attribute ownership of objects to a robot that engages in social gaze with a human. Participants watched videos of robot-human interactions, in which objects were possessed or new objects were created. Children and adults applied the same ownership rules to humans and robots – irrespective of (...) whether the robot engaged in social gaze or not. However, there was cultural variation in the types of ownership rules used. In Experiment 3, we removed further social cues, finding that just showing a pair of self-propelled robot-arms elicited ownership attributions. The role of social gaze in social attributions to robots and cross-cultural differences in ownership understanding are discussed. (shrink)

How do human children come up to carve up and think of the world around them in its most general and abstract structure? And to which degree are these general forms of viewing the world shared by other animals, notably by non-human primates? In response to these questions of what could be called comparative metaphysics, this paper discusses new evidence from developmental and comparative research to argue for the following picture: human children and non-human primates share a basic framework of (...) natural ontology: they think about their natural surroundings in essentialist ways in terms of natural kind objects constituted by their essential properties, and in generic terms as governed by general descriptive regularities. In contrast, there is a great divide when it comes to how human children and non-human primates carve up their social environment: only human children then go on to use their essentialist and generic thinking for developing a distinctively social ontology, to conceive of their surrounding in terms of socially constituted objects governed by general prescriptive norms. (shrink)

Research on children's developing moral cognition has mostly focused on their evaluation of, and reasoning about, others' intrinsically harmful (non-)verbal actions (e.g., hitting, lying). But assertions may have morally relevant (intended or unintended) consequences, too. For instance, if someone wrongly claims that “This water is clean!”, such an incorrect representation of reality may have harmful consequences to others. In two experiments, we investigated preschoolers' evaluation of others' morally relevant factual claims. In Experiment 1, children witnessed a puppet making incorrect assertions (...) that would lead to harm or to no harm. In Experiment 2, incorrect assertions would always lead to harm, but the puppet either intended the harm to occur or not. Children evaluated the puppet’s factual claim more negatively when they anticipated harmful versus harmless consequences (Experiment 1) and when the puppet’s intention was bad versus good over and above harmful consequences (Experiment 2). These findings suggest that preschoolers’ normative understanding is not limited to evaluating others’ intrinsically harmful transgressions, but also entails an appreciation of the morally relevant consequences of, and intentions underlying, others’ factual claims. (shrink)

Owned objects are typically viewed as non-fungible-they cannot be freely interchanged. We report three experiments (total N=312) demonstrating this intuition in preschool-aged children. In Experiment 1, children considered an agent who takes one of two identical objects and leaves the other for a peer. Children viewed this as acceptable when the agent took his own item, but not when he took his peer's item. In Experiment 2, children considered scenarios where one agent took property from another. Children said the victim (...) could take back her own property from the perpetrator, but that she could not take an identical object belonging to the perpetrator. Finally, in Experiment 3A and 3B, children considered scenarios where a teacher could give a child either of two objects to play with-an object that the child had recently played with, or another object that looked the same. Children were more likely to say that the teacher should give the object recently played with when it belonged to the child, compared with when it belonged to the teacher. These findings are informative about the basis of judgments that property is non-fungible, and about young children's representation of ownership rights. They show that children's representation of ownership rights is not limited to principles protecting owners from being deprived. Our findings instead suggest that ownership rights are viewed as pertaining to individual objects. (shrink)

In this paper we address the question how children come to understand normativity through simple forms of social interaction. A recent line of research suggests that even very young children can understand social norms quite independently of any moral context. We focus on a methodological procedure developed by Rakoczy et al., Developmental Psychology, 44, 875–881, that measures children’s protest behaviour when a pre-established constitutive rule has been violated. Children seem to protest when they realize that rule violations are not allowed (...) or should not have happened. We point out that there is more than one possible explanation for children’s reactions in these studies. They could be due to disobeying an authority, an inability to follow a rule, or the violation of an empirical expectation due to the mismatch between statement and action. We thus question whether it would still count as an indicator for normative understanding if children responded to aspects of the game other than the violation of a constitutive rule and conclude that the protesting behavior, when taken in isolation, does not suffice as evidence for normative understanding. (shrink)

Human cooperation and group living are based on societies in which individuals not only care about their own interests but share common norms and values – such as morality and prosocial behavior. As early as the 18th century, Immanuel Kant postulated autonomy as the key to human morality. Kant explained that a rational agent with a free will would necessarily make moral – not immoral – decisions. However, the fundamental question of how moral behavior acquires normative weight remains unresolved until (...) the present day, especially when moral behavior entails personal costs for the individual. This dissertation builds on Kant’s thesis and aims to investigate important building blocks of moral autonomy at preschool age. Therefore, children’s own prosocial decisions as well as their normative and descriptive expectations about others’ prosocial actions are assessed and linked to fundamental underlying mechanisms such as cultural learning and collective intentionality. Study 1 assessed whether preschoolers enforce agreed-upon prosocial ver-sus selfish sharing norms in a group dictator game. Three- and 5-year-old children and two hand puppets had the opportunity to agree on how to distribute re-sources between themselves and a group of passive recipients. The findings sug-gest that preschoolers understand prosocial, but not selfish, agreements as binding even though prosocial sharing norms are associated with personal costs. Study Set 2 assessed in two experiments whether observed choice increases the children’s own prosocial sharing behavior. In Experiment 1, children observed an adult model who was provided with costly choice, non-costly choice, or no choice. As a next step, children were given the opportunity to decide how many stickers they would like to share with a sad animal puppet. Experiment 2 aimed to investigate possible age effects. The study design was reduced to condition and, a second test trial was added. Taken together, the results of Study Set 2 suggest that 5-year-old’s prosocial sharing behavior increases when previously having observed someone who intentionally acts prosocially at a personal cost. Study 3 investigated preschoolers’ descriptive expectations about the causal agent of prosocial and selfish actions, based on agents’ prior history of voluntary versus involuntary prosocial behavior. The results show that children at the age of 5.5 years use information about the circumstances and intentions of previous actions to generate descriptive expectations about other’s future prosocial behavior. From 4 years of age, children distinguish between an agent who shares voluntarily and an agent who shares only involuntarily. Taken together, this dissertation shows that preschool aged children infer and enforce prosocial – but not selfish – sharing norms. They engage in prosocial sharing which is affected by observed choice and they form descriptive expectations about others tendency to behave prosocial or selfish on the base of knowledge about the agents prosocial versus selfish intentions. (shrink)

People sometimes disagree about who owns which objects, and these ownership dilemmas can lead to costly disputes. We investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying people's judgments about finder versus landowner cases, in which a person finds an object on someone else's land. We test psychological hypotheses motivated directly by three major principles that govern these cases in the law. The results show that people are more likely to favor the finder when the object is in a public space compared to a (...) private space. We find mixed support for the hypothesis that people are less likely to favor a finder who is employed by the landowner. Last, we find no support for the hypothesis that people are more likely to favor finders for objects located above ground compared to below ground. We discuss implications for psychological theories of ownership and potential applications to property law. (shrink)

Humans have attained an unparalleled level of sophistication when engaging in collaborative and cooperative activities. Remarkably, the skills and motivation to engage in complex forms of collaboration and cooperation seem to emerge early on during infancy and childhood. In this paper, I extensively review the literature on the evolution and development of human cooperation, emphasizing important aspects of inter-cultural variation in collaborative and cooperative behaviour. This will not only allow us to confront the different evolutionary scenarios in which cooperation may (...) have emerged, but will especially provide the reader with a first orientation in the abundant literature on human cooperation. (shrink)

Given the complexity of human social life, it is astonishing to observe how quickly children adapt to their social environment. To be accepted by the other members, it is crucial to understand and follow the rules and norms shared by the group. How and from whom do young children learn these social rules? In the experiments, based on the crucial role of affective social learning and dominance hierarchies in simple rule understanding, we showed 15-to-23-month-olds and 3-to-5-year-old children videos where the (...) agents’ body size and affective cues were manipulated. In the dominant rule-maker condition, when a smaller protagonist puts an object in one location, a bigger agent reacts with a positive reaction; on the contrary, when the smaller protagonist puts an object in another location, the bigger agent displays a negative reaction. In the subordinate rule-maker condition, the roles are shifted but the agents differ. Toddlers expect the protagonist to follow the rules (based on anticipatory looks), independent of the dominant status of the rule-making agent. Three-to-five-year-old pre-schoolers overall perform at the chance level but expect the protagonist to disobey a rule in the first trial, and obey the rule in the second trial if the rule-maker is dominant. (shrink)

Both evolutionary and developmental research indicate that humans are adapted to respecting property rights, independently (and possibly orthogonally) of considerations of fairness. We offer evidence from psychological experiments suggesting that enforcing one's rights and respecting others' possessions are basic cognitive mechanisms automatically activated and grounded in humans' sensory-motor system. This may entail an independent motivation that is more profound than considerations of fairness and impartiality.

The developmental evidence for children's respect for ownership reveals that children will enforce the property rights of third parties before they themselves respect other's property. This pattern of development suggests the need for clarification or modification of the minimalist model. Here, I consider three explanations for the gap between knowledge and behavior for respect of ownership.