3-172 - The Development of Social and Moral Reasoning about Ownership

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

Ownership of property strongly influences children’s intuitions about what is acceptable and the judgments they make about others. The four papers in this symposium explore how children reason about different forms of ownership and about different types of ownership violations. In each case, the findings suggest that social and moral principles enter into children’s reasoning about ownership, including principles pertaining to autonomy, the moral-conventional distinction, fairness, and reputation.

The first paper shows that 4-7-year-olds believe that they are owned by their parents. The findings suggest that children draw this surprising conclusion because they spontaneously consider autonomy principles when judging whether entities can be owned. The second paper examines whether 4-6-year-olds see violations of ownership rights as moral or conventional transgressions. The findings reveal a developmental shift whereby younger children view ownership violations to be equally bad in the absence of rules forbidding them, but older children view them as more acceptable when not forbidden by authorities. The third paper shows that 3-6-year-olds understand that individual members of a group have limited rights over group-owned property, and suggests that children may reason about group ownership rights by drawing on principles of fairness. The fourth paper investigates children’s attitudes toward theft of intellectual and physical property. The findings show that 6-9-year-olds negatively judge agents who fail to acknowledge the source of property they use, and that with development these objections increasingly focus on uses of intellectual property. These findings suggest that children’s objections to theft stem from reputational concerns.

Sub Unit

• Social Cognition

Chairs

• Ori Friedman, University of Waterloo

• Christina Starmans, Yale University

Individual Presentations

• Why children believe they are owned: Autonomy and the ownership of living entities - Presenting Author: Christina Starmans, Yale University; Ori Friedman, University of Waterloo

• Children’s Evaluations of Ownership Transgressions - Presenting Author: Nicholaus Noles, University of Louisville; Catherine McDermott, University of Louisville

• Children’s Developing Understanding of Limited Rights in Group Ownership - Presenting Author: Ori Friedman, University of Waterloo; Michelle Huh, University of Waterloo

• Non-Acknowledgement and Idea Theft - Presenting Author: Alex Shaw, University of Chicago; Kristina Olson, University of Washington