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1-088 - Norms of Possession in Child Development

Thu, April 6, 12:00 to 1:30pm, Austin Convention Center, Meeting Room 19B

Session Type: Paper Symposium

Integrative Statement

From early on, children need to adapt to a social world saturated with norms. Particularly, norms regulating access to—and control of—desired objects are central to the everyday lives of children. Rules are not self-evident; although equipped with cognitive and social capacities that originated in evolutionary history, children still need to crack the cultural code that is embedded in the patterns of their daily dealings with other individuals and their possessions.

At this symposium we will examine children’s interaction with norms from three different perspectives: developmental, trans-cultural and trans-species. The first paper compares children’s and great apes’ normative orientations toward property, in particular their respect for the property of other individuals, and their attitudes toward theft and retaliation. The second paper examines some differences in how preschoolers and adults reason about ownership; in particular, it discusses the different weight they give to arguments such as “discovery”, “invested labor” or “first possession” when justifying ownership claims. The third paper examines the relative universality regarding norms of possession, comparing children of highly contrasted socio-cultural contexts on their determinations of object and land ownership, and concluding that in early development, labor stands out as a stable rationale for attributing possession.

Together, the symposium presentations will provide new perspectives on the development of reasoning about possession, ownership and sharing, while highlighting the dynamic interaction between cognition, on the one hand, and social and cultural environments, on the other.

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