Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

People are constantly surrounded by objects, yet how they interact with and reason about others' actions with these objects depend on ownership. From young ages, children readily reason about ownership and the rights it confers to owners, and use this understanding to make various social inferences, predictions, and judgements. To date, there is no consistent or coherent definition of ownership or how it is structured as a concept. The objective of the current proposal is to characterize the cognitive processes underlying ownership reasoning and how this reasoning develops in childhood. Specifically, the proposed work will test the prediction that there is a core notion of ownership, and that it is understood within a broader social cognitive framework of intuitive psychology. In particular, this research will test a novel characterization of human concepts of ownership using terms within the previously established and successful computational model of social cognition formalizing human's intuitive psychology, referred to as naïve utility calculus (e.g., Jara-Ettinger et al., 2016). In three aims, this research will investigate whether reasoning about costs to owners and benefits to nonowners underlie reasoning about ownership transgressions, and whether information about shared and privileged utility is used to infer social affiliations. The proposed research will use an experimental approach by testing 3- to 6-year-old children and adults in studies involving third-party judgements where they will predict and explain what a particular agent will do. The findings of the proposed work will make empirical and theoretical contributions to our understanding of ownership concepts, the way it develops, and how it can be expressed in terms consistent with formal models of human cognition. Because the findings of this work will shed light on human cognition, fundamental psychological processes, including judgment and decision making and reasoning, and development, the proposed research fits well within the scope of NSERC. The knowledge gained from the proposed work can help to provide a specific and generalizable definition of ownership that can be used in psychology, cognitive science, and other related disciplines. The findings will help to explain how and why physical objects come to have social meaning, with impacts on what constitutes moral and prosocial behavior, and will help to integrate the psychology of ownership into broader theories of social cognition. Additionally, these findings will have practical and applied significance - by understanding the cognitive processes underlying ownership reasoning, we can learn how to prevent and resolve disputes over objects and improve ownership misunderstandings in childhood. Given that conflicts involving owned objects are prevalent in early childhood, these findings will also be of interest to parents, caregivers, and educators.