Poster #26 - Egyptian children prioritize ownership rights over competing principles of entitlement

• In Event: 3-206 - Poster Session 13
  In Poster Session: PS 13 Section - Cognitive Processes

Integrative Statement

Ownership affects young children’s judgments about whether it is permissible to use objects (e.g., Rossano, Rakoczy, & Tomasello, 2013; Schmidt, Rakoczy, & Tomasello, 2013). Moreover, some findings suggest that young children often give ownership priority over other competing principles of entitlement. For example, 4-to 7-year-olds typically side with the owner when told of a conflict between one agent who loaned an object but wanted it returned before the second agent, who borrowed it, completed their goal with it (Neary & Friedman, 2014). Such findings suggest that children may rigidly apply ownership rules. However, these findings may be specific to Western children, and judgments could differ in children from another culture. To examine this possibility, we investigated ownership judgments in Egyptian children. Egypt is distinctive in many respects from the United States and other Western cultures. It is a collectivist, paternalistic society and one of the most population dense countries in the world.

We tested forty-six 4-year-olds (M = 4.5) and forty-nine 7-year-olds (M = 7.5) in Egypt. Participants were told two stories about two children and a teacher. In each story, one child was using a borrowed object to complete a task, but the other child wanted them to stop using it immediately. Critically, children heard the stories in one of two between-subjects conditions, which only differed in whether the borrowed object was owned by the second child or to the teacher. Following each story, we asked children two questions (e.g., "Would it be okay for this boy to keep using the scissors? Should he stop using the scissors?"). In both conditions, responses that sided with the second child, who wanted the first child to stop using the item, were recorded.

A Generalized Estimating Equations model (binary logistic with an unstructured matrix) with the predictors age (4-year-olds, 7-year-olds) and condition (child owns, teacher owns) revealed a main effect of condition, Wald χ2 = 15.13, p < .001, but no effect of age, and no interaction, ps > .167. As can be seen in Figure 1, the main effect of condition resulted because children were more likely to side against the character who was using the object when it belonged to the other child, compared with when it belonged to the teacher. Single-sample tests showed that when the second character owned the object, children mostly sided with this character, Wald χ2 = 54.75, p < .001. When the teacher owned the object, children only showed a marginal trend in this direction, Wald χ2 = 3.90, p = .051.

These findings suggest that when ownership rights and need conflict, Egyptian children prioritize ownership rights. This endorsement of ownership rights was consistent across the two age groups. The differences in responses by condition support that children were specifically using ownership as a basis for their responses. These findings suggest that giving priority to ownership over competing principles of entitlement is not just limited to children in the West, and can be found in other, notably different, cultures.

Authors

• Helana Girgis, Hartwick College
  Presenting Author

• Ori Friedman, University of Waterloo
  Non-Presenting Author

• Simone Nguyen, University of North Carolina Wilmington
  Non-Presenting Author