Humans are extraordinarily prosocial, and research conducted primarily in North America indicates that giving to others is emotionally rewarding. To examine whether the hedonic benefits of giving represent a universal feature of human behavior, we extended upon previous cross-cultural examinations by investigating whether inhabitants of a small-scale, rural, and isolated village in Vanuatu, where villagers have little influence from urban, Western culture, survive on subsistence farming without electricity, and have minimal formal education, report or display emotional rewards from engaging in prosocial (vs. personally beneficial) behavior. In Study 1, adults were randomly assigned to purchase candy for either themselves or others and then reported their positive affect. Consistent with previous research, adults purchasing goods for others reported greater positive emotion than adults receiving resources for themselves. In Study 2, 2- to 5-year-old children received candy and were subsequently asked to engage in costly giving (sharing their own candy with a puppet) and non-costly giving (sharing the experimenter's candy with a puppet). Emotional expressions were video-recorded during the experiment and later coded for happiness. Consistent with previous research conducted in Canada, children displayed more happiness when giving treats away than when receiving treats themselves. Moreover, the emotional rewards of giving were largest when children engaged in costly (vs. non-costly) giving. Taken together, these findings indicate that the emotional rewards of giving are detectable in people living in diverse societies and support the possibility that the hedonic benefits of generosity are universal.

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It is impossible to perceive who owns an object; this must be inferred. One way that children make such inferences is through a first possession bias--when two agents each use an object, children judge the object belongs to the one who used it first. Two experiments show that this bias does not result from children directly inferring ownership from first possession; the experiments instead support an alternative account according to which the first possession bias reflects children's historical reasoning. In Experiment 1, eighty-five 3- to 5-year-olds only based inferences on first possession when it was informative about the past. In Experiment 2, thirty-two 5-year-olds based ownership judgments on testimony about past contact, while disregarding testimony about future contact.

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Ownership influences the permissibility of people's use of objects. Understanding ownership is therefore necessary for socially appropriate behavior and is an important part of children's social‐cognitive development. Children are sophisticated in their reasoning about ownership early in development. They make a variety of judgments about ownership, including judgments about how ownership is acquired, who owns what, and ownership rights. Understanding how children reason about ownership can also inform broader questions about the nature and origins of ownership.