3-081 - New Perspectives on the Development of Ownership Reasoning: The Influence of Social Knowledge and Socio-cultural Environments

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Ownership is an important psychological concept that guides how people interact with their own and other people’s property. As such, reasoning about ownership is an important part of children’s social-cognitive development. Recent research has revealed that preschoolers are quite sophisticated in reasoning about ownership: they use many cues to infer who owns what (e.g., Blake & Harris, 2009; Friedman & Neary, 2008; Kanngiesser, Gjersoe & Hood, 2010) and uphold people’s ownership rights (e.g., Rossano, Rakoczy, & Tomasello, 2011). This ownership psychology heavily shapes social interactions and is itself influenced by socio-cultural inputs. The four papers in this symposium investigate how these social factors influence people’s judgements and reasoning about ownership. The first and second papers examine ownership in relation to children’s broader social knowledge. While the first paper demonstrates that children draw on their knowledge of emotions when inferring who owns an object, the second paper reveals that children consider reputation when reasoning about the ownership of ideas. The third and fourth papers examine ownership in relation to the social effects of culture on development. The third paper finds that children in small-scale societies respect ownership in their everyday social interactions, but apply this reasoning to third party interactions later than Western children. Finally, the fourth shows that preschool children in different socio-economic environments develop ethical reasoning about ownership with some impact of local social-cultural norms. Together, the symposium presentations will provide new perspectives on the development of ownership reasoning highlighting the dynamic interaction between social knowledge and socio-cultural environments.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chairs

• Patricia Kanngiesser, Max Planck Inst for Evol Anthropology

• Ori Friedman, University of Waterloo

Individual Presentations

• Preschoolers use Emotions to Infer who Owns What - Presenting Author: Madison Pesowski, Univ of Waterloo; Ori Friedman, University of Waterloo

• Whose Idea is it Anyway: Reputation and Idea Theft - Presenting Author: Alex W. Shaw, University of Chicago; Kristina R Olson, University of Washington

• The Development of Ownership Understanding in Small-scale Societies - Presenting Author: Patricia Kanngiesser, Max Planck Inst for Evol Anthropology; Federico Rossano, Max Planck Inst for Evol Anthropology; Henriette Zeidler, Max Planck Institute; Michael Tomasello, Max Planck Institute

• Ethical Reasoning About Ownership in 3- to 7- year-old Children of 8 Cultures - Presenting Author: Philippe Rochat, Emory University; Gustavo Faigenbaum, 1110 E South Campus Dr, 205C