Unsolicited but acceptable: Non-owners can access property if the owner benefits.

Abstract

People are normally restricted from accessing property without permission from the owner. The principle that non-owners are excluded from property is central to theories of ownership, and previous findings suggest it could be a core feature of the psychology of ownership. However, we report six experiments on children (N=480) and adults (N=211) showing that this principle may not apply for actions that benefit the owner-actions like repairing broken property. In Experiment 1, 3-5-year-olds judged it more acceptable for a non-owner to repair broken property than to move it. Experiments 2 and 3 replicated this with 4-6-year-olds using different question wordings, and showed that children also approve of replacing broken property. Experiment 4 showed these findings replicate regardless of whether the non-owner and owner are acquainted. Finally, Experiments 5 and 6 revealed a boundary condition on approval of unsolicited beneficial actions: Both 4-6-year-olds and adults judged repairing property more acceptable than modifying it to suit the owner's preferences. These findings suggest that restrictions on non-owners are less absolute than often claimed, and that participants' judgments depended on generic information about which actions are typically beneficial, rather than on consideration of owner's specific preferences.

When rules are over-ruled: Virtual bargaining as a contractualist method of moral judgment

“…Indeed, there is already some evidence that violations of the simple rule about property rights often seem intuitively acceptable. Direct improvements to someone else's property, for instance, are often judged permissible (Stonehouse and Friedman 2021). We hypothesize that participants sometimes reach for an agreement-based process to determine permissibility in these cases.…”

“…(This rule is sometimes referred to in legal theory as "the right to exclusion." See Stonehouse and Friedman (2021) for further references and discussion.) Hank should therefore refuse the stranger's offer and not touch his neighbor's property.…”

Young Children Infer Psychological Ownership from Stewardship

“…Young children know much about ownership and it has widespread effects on their thoughts and actions. For example, young children are often successful in inferring and keeping track of who items belong to (e.g., Blake & Harris, 2009;Espinosa & Starmans, 2020;McDermott & Noles, 2018), and considerations of ownership impact children's actions towards objects (e.g., Davoodi et al, 2020;Kanngiesser et al, 2020) and intellectual property, their protests of others' actions (Rossano et al, 2011;Schmidt et al, 2013), and their moral and social judgments about both physical and intellectual property (e.g., Gelman et al, 2018;Shaw & Olson, 2015;Stonehouse & Friedman, 2021). Most of this work, though, touches on children's understanding of legal or actual ownership.…”

Preschoolers use the means principle in their moral judgments.

“…Moreover, many of the moral rules that children are explicitly "taught" by caregivers are also simultaneously developing via more implicit means. For instance, knowledge of the rule "do not take things that do not belong to you" is both taught by caregivers but also seems to develop simultaneously with a robust and sophisticated sense of personal property rights and who has the right to touch, move, modify and destroy what objects (Ross et al, 2015;Stonehouse & Friedman, 2021). Likewise, the rule "do not hit others" develops simultaneously with an early understanding of harm and battery, the pain it causes others, and who is responsible for the harm they cause and under what circumstances (Hamlin, 2013;Piaget, 1932Piaget, /1965Weisberg & Leslie, 2012).…”