Whose chair is it, anyway?? Part II: The role of first possession and social recognition of property in the resolution of ownership conflicts by children and adults.

FAIGENBAUM, GUSTAVO; SIGMAN, MARIANO; CASIRAGHI, LEANDRO

Buenos Aires

Congreso; 2nd Congress of the Federation of Latin-American and Caribbean Societies for Neuroscience (FALAN); 2016

FALAN

Establishing ownership over something requires 1) a claim over it, based on specific reasons (?It is mine because I ...?); 2) validation by others; i.e. property has no meaning when it is not respected by other people. In this work we studied how children and adults consider such factors when judging over third-party conflicts of property.First, we faced participants (110 children; 74 adults) with cartoons depicting arguments between two children who presented conflicting claims over the ownership of an object, and asked them to decide who should own it. Children showed a marked preference for ?first possessors? in all of the stories, favoring them in significantly more cases (Mdn = 4/4 cases) than adults (2/4).Then we focused on the importance of social recognition of property in such conflicts. Adult volunteers (359) were presented with similar situations in which we modulated whether the second character, or other third-parties, were aware of the first possessor?s claims. Both possibilities had effect on decisions, with statements of recognition significantly increasing the proportion of judgments favoring the first character.Our experiments demonstrate that the power of ownership claims are not equally considered by adults and children, with the latter relying more on first-possession over the specific nature of claims. Adults also evaluate social recognition to decide in third-party conflicts. It remains to be tested whether are responsive to this factor or not.