Association as a Psychological Justification for Ownership

Creation in judgments about the establishment of ownership

“…Following previous studies of principles underlying people's ownership judgments (e.g., Beggan & Brown, 1994;Friedman, 2008Friedman, , 2010Hook, 1993;, we examined participants' judgments about third-party vignettes in which two characters each want an object. Participants read vignettes in which an "agent" saw and then acted on an object, sometimes with the consequence of creating a new object.…”

“…Participants in Beggan and Brown (1994) read a story about a boy who either played with a tree branch or carved it into the shape of an airplane. He then left the branch where he found it, and returned later to find it in someone else's possession.…”

Possession is not always the law: With age, preschoolers increasingly use verbal information to identify who owns what

“…Legal rulings support rights of possessors over those of nonpossessors (Dukeminier, Krier, Alexander, & Shill, 2006), and adults use possession as a cue to ownership when other information is absent. For example, in a direct study of this issue, undergraduates were told a story about a divorcing couple where both spouses lay claim to a particular possession (e.g., a TV) (Beggan & Brown, 1994). When shown pictures of one of the spouses with the TV and the other spouse alone, participants indicated that whichever spouse was pictured with the TV had a stronger claim on it.…”

Property and Emotions

“…From a psychological perspective, scholars have identified what we might term "proprietary" emotions, such as material possession attachment and place attachment; such research explores what property means to us as individuals and as a society, and the basic emotional traits associated with the broad constructs of "ownership" and "possession" (Beggan & Brown, 1994;Bloom, 1991;Rudmin, 1991). So far, however, little of this research has been mapped onto the field of law.…”