The Development of Children's Judgments of What is Owned and Who Can Own

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In everyday life, we often make judgments that pertaining to ownership of property. Many of these judgments occur with so little effort, that we may be hardly aware of them. For example, it does not take much reflection to judge that cars in a parking lot are owned, or that your friend owns the hat you see her wearing. Nonetheless, these judgments are important and have wide-ranging effects on our thoughts and feelings about objects, and on how (and whether) we use them. The proposed research examines the early development of ownership judgments by exploring how young children think about ownership. Some of the most basic and fundamental ownership judgments we make are judgments of what is owned (e.g., the cars in the parking lot are owned; the stars in the sky are not), and who is an owner (e.g., your friend owns things; grasshoppers do not). I propose four series of experiments to examine these judgments in children. One series of experiments examines young children’s judgments about the ownership of natural objects. Previous research has found that children often assume that natural objects are non-owned. For instance, if children are shown a stone or an unfamiliar plant, they will typically assert that these things do not belong to anyone. The studies in this line of research examines whether these judgments depend on children’s assessments of whether objects are human-made and their assessments of whether objects have human-serving functions. Another series of experiments examines whether children judge that certain things cannot be owned. Although natural objects like pinecones and rocks are not normally owned, they can easily become owned. In contrast, people might deny that someone could own the stars or the moon. Studies in this line of research examine whether children also resist viewing certain objects as property, and these studies also examine whether such judgments stem (at least in part) on whether objects can be controlled. If children hold that owners are entitled to control their property, they might deny that non-controllable things can be owned. The two other series of experiments investigate children’s judgments about who can own property. One series examines children’s judgments of whether non-human entities (e.g., animals, robots) can own property. These experiments also investigate whether children think that animacy is a precondition for being an owner, and that being owned prevents an entity from itself owning things. The other series of experiments on judgments about who can own property investigates whether children grasp that groups (e.g., families or clubs) can own property. Together, these four series of experiments will be informative about the early development of ownership judgments, and will help reveal whether children's judgments about what can be owned, and who can own, depend on assessments of quite abstract and non-obvious properties of objects and entities.