On the social nature of nonsocial perception: The mere ownership effect.

Abstract

The assumption of the present research was that ownership of an object causes the owner to treat the object as a social entity because ownership creates a psychological association between the object and the owner. Three experiments investigated whether Ss would evaluate an object more favorably merely because they owned it, a bias analogous to other self-serving biases people display. Study 1 confirmed the existence of this mere ownership effect. Study 2 showed that the effect was not due to Ss having greater exposure to an owned object relative to an unowned object. Study 3 showed that the effect may be a specific instance of a general tendency of people to make self-enhancing judgments.

Grasping the concept of personal property

“…This is a classic effect demonstrating irrationality in markets (Kahneman et al, 1990;Maddux et al, 2010). Further, the 'mere ownership' effect demonstrates an affective influence of ownership: people prefer and give significantly more positive evaluations to items they own compared to those they do not (Beggan, 1992).…”

“…Given the importance western society places on private property, possessions, and ownership, it is no surprise that ownership has been studied in a range of disciplines. To date investigations into ownership in the cognitive sciences have focused on select phenomena associated with modelling economic markets and valuation judgements (Beggan, 1992;Kahneman, Knetsch, & Thaler, 1990;Thaler, 1980). Here, we draw on the idea that higher-level processes and cognitive abstractions may be linked to perception and action, and propose that the visuomotor system responds differently to our own property compared with objects owned by other individuals.…”

Editorial: A Review of Self-Processing Biases in Cognition

“…It is widely accepted that self-processing elicits a positivity bias, such that self-esteem is protected by a rose-tinted perspective in self-evaluations and autobiographical memory (D'Argembeau & van der Linden, 2008;Walker, Skowronski, & Thompson, 2003). This also extends to owned objects, which are perceived to have more positive characteristics than similar objects owned by others (the "mere ownership" effect; Beggan, 1992).…”

The SPOT Effect: People Spontaneously Prefer their Own Theories

“…We showed experimentally that, even where theory ownership is established in the most minimal of ways-simply by asking participants to imagine that a theory is theirs rather than someone else's or nobody's in particular-participants are inclined to increase their estimates of the likelihood that that theory is true, as they consider successive items of evidence bearing on the truth of that theory. As such, the SPOT effect is simultaneously a type of confirmation bias (Nickerson, 1998), a mere ownership effect (Beggan, 1992), and an instance of selfenhancement (Sedikides & Gregg, 2008).…”