Children, but not great apes, respect ownership

Abstract

Access to and control of resources is a major source of costly conflicts. Animals, under some conditions, respect what others control and use (i.e. possession). Humans not only respect possession of resources, they also respect ownership. Ownership can be viewed as a cooperative arrangement, where individuals inhibit their tendency to take others’ property on the condition that those others will do the same. We investigated to what degree great apes follow this principle, as compared to human children. We conducted two experiments, in which dyads of individuals could access the same food resources. The main test of respect for ownership was whether individuals would refrain from taking their partner's resources even when the partner could not immediately access and control them. Captive apes (N = 14 dyads) failed to respect their partner's claim on food resources and frequently monopolized the resources when given the opportunity. Human children (N = 14 dyads), tested with a similar apparatus and procedure, respected their partner's claim and made spontaneous verbal references to ownership. Such respect for the property of others highlights the uniquely cooperative nature of human ownership arrangements.

The moral psychology of obligation

“…As another example, Schaefer et al (2015) found that 4- to 11-year-old children from three different cultural groups (one WEIRD – Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic – and two small-scale African cultures) took into account work-based merit (i.e., based on who produces the most resources) in culturally specific ways (some giving it more weight than others) when deciding how to divvy up collaboratively acquired resources. And Kanngeisser et al (2019) found that while children from several very different cultural contexts all respected the property of others, there was at the same time cultural variation in how much they did so.…”

The Privacy Mismatch: Evolved Intuitions in a Digital World

“…Today, the concept of ownership is present in nearly all existing human languages and cultures, and it has been shown to emerge early in childhood ( Boyer, 2015 ). Two-year-olds already infer ownership of objects, and 4-year-olds can discern ownership on the basis of investment of labor, refraining from taking resources accordingly ( Kanngiesser et al., 2020 ). In adolescence, the things an individual owns can be enveloped into his or her identity—creating an “extended self” ( Belk, 2018 ).…”

Mobile containers in human cognitive evolution studies: Understudied and underrepresented

“…Thus, humans tend to accumulate—and carry on their person—significant amounts of stuff, in addition to caching things they “own” (Figure 1). Supporting this assertion is the tendency of human children, unlike great apes, to respect ownership, 35 though the development of ownership concepts differs between cultures 36 . Today, mobile containers are used to retain and transport surpluses of food and water for future consumption or for later sharing with others, as well as to carry phones, money, keys, pens, contraceptives, cosmetics, and numerous other tools.…”