Ownership is an important part of our daily lives, but most
of us do not spend much time thinking about how we make decisions about who
owns things. We care about ownership,
because the owner of an object gets to decide what is done with it. Owners also benefit from the value of the
object.
It might seem straightforward to decide who owns something,
but it quickly becomes clear that things are more complicated than they seem. Consider just a simple trip to the store. You walk into a department store, and you
know that all of the objects are owned by the store. If you take one off the shelf, you are
expressing an interest in owning the object, but you don’t own it yet. So, just holding something does not make it yours. If you pay the price of the object to the
store, exchanging money for the object, it becomes yours, even while you are
still standing in the store. So, the
exchange matters. If you run out of the
store with the object, then you have it in your possession, but the object
still belongs to the store.
What kinds of principles to people use to make judgments
about ownership?
This question was explored in an interesting paper by Max
Palamar, Doan Le, and Ori Friedman in a 2012 paper in the journal Cognition. They looked at the relationship between
people’s beliefs about who is responsible for an action and who owns an object.
When you are in the store, bringing an item to the cashier
is your way of announcing that you would like to own it. When the cashier accepts your money, you and
the store are reaching an agreement about ownership. In this way, you are both responsible for the
decision about who owns the object.
The authors of this research paper look at situations where
an object is not currently owned by anyone.
When people judge who is responsible for an action, they often focus on
whether someone intended to bring about a particular result and whether their
action actually led to the desired result.
In one example they use, a man named Mike sees a feather on
top of a cactus in the desert. If Mike
wants to get the feather for himself, and he knocks it down with a stick, then
we clearly think he is responsible for getting the feather out of the cactus. If he knocks his stick against the cactus and
the feather falls out without the intention to get the feather, then we think
Mike is less responsible for getting the feather out.
What would happen in these cases if after the feather fell
from the cactus a second man walked up to the feather as it was lying on the
ground and picked it up? Who would be
the owner of the feather?
In several studies, people judge that Mike has more right to
be the owner of the feather than Dave when he is more responsible for the
action of freeing the feather. So, when
Mike wants the feather and takes an action that leads the feather to fall, then
people think he should get the feather.
If Mike dislodges the feather accidentally, then people think he has
less claim to owning it then if he deliberately dislodges the feather.
Why should we reason about ownership and responsibility in
similar ways?
One reason why this makes sense is because of the importance
of control in ownership. Because owning
something allows me to control what is done with it, I am a better owner of
that object when I have already done things to take responsibility for actions
related to that object. So, having an
intention related to the object and carrying out an action that fulfills that
intention demonstrates that a person deserves the control over that object that
comes with being an owner.
