有关成人社会权力认知的研究已有大量的成果及理论,但儿童的社会权力认知近期才受到关注。社会权力认知是儿童社会认知的重要组成部分。社会权力经常体现在社会支配及社会地位上的差异。从很早开始,儿童就能基于不同的线索来判断社会权力,儿童基于这些线索的认知发展有进化上的适应意义。儿童对社会权力获得方式的认知会随年龄增长而发生变化,年幼儿童更认可基于支配的社会权力获得方式,而年长儿童更认可基于声望的社会权力获得方式。儿童的社会权力认知会影响选择性信任、资源分配及亲社会行为。未来研究需要考虑影响儿童社会权力认知发展的内部机制以及儿童社会权力对社会行为影响的过程机制,并考虑文化因素和早期互动经验对儿童社会权力认知发展的影响。

An understanding of ownership entails the recognition that ownership can be transferred permanently and the ability to differentiate legitimate from illegitimate transfers. Two experiments explored the development of this understanding in 2-, 3-, 4- and 5-year olds, using stories about gift-giving and stealing. The possibility that children use simple biases to identify owners, such as a first possessor, current possessor or a loan bias, was also investigated. Five-year olds appropriately acknowledged a permanent transfer of ownership in the case of giving but not stealing. Four-year olds allowed permanent transfers but struggled to differentiate legitimate from illegitimate transfers. Many 4-year olds allowed adults, but not children, to keep property that had been stolen. Two- and 3-year olds exhibited a first possessor bias for both stories. We conclude that, by 5 years of age, children possess a mature understanding of ownership transfer whereas younger children are prone to biases.

ABSTRACT The psycholegal study of property law, theory, and doctrine is a new and developing topic area. As one Article in a Special Issue of the Tulane Law Review, this paper serves as a broad introduction and overview to the field. Aimed at both legal academics and social scientists, a primary goal is to encourage interdisciplinary collaboration between the fields in order to promote additional empirical research in the area. Thus, I first identify the important theoretical connections between psycholegal research and property law, theory, and policy. Next, I review what work has been conducted, as well as some contemporary research (including the other Articles in the Issue). Finally, I indicate several under-explored topic areas available to psycholegal scholars, and sketch what a research program taking a psychological perspective on property law might look like in a number of areas. I demonstrate the close relationship between empirical psychological findings and property law and theory, and discuss the potential for more.

Property is rare in most nonhuman primates, most likely because their lifestyles are not conducive to it. Nonetheless, just because these species do not frequently maintain property does not mean that they lack the propensity to do so. Primates show respect for possession, as well as behaviors related to property, such as irrational decision making regarding property (e.g., the endowment effect) and barter. The limiting factor in species other than humans is likely the lack of social and institutional controls for maintaining property. By comparing primates and humans, we gain a better understanding of how human property concepts have evolved.

This study examined children's judgments of damage to public versus private property in China at two historical times. Participants were two cohorts (1980 and 2012) of elementary school children at ages 7, 9, and 1102years. The children were administered paired stories that described a protagonist who damaged public or private property with a good or bad intention. The results showed that children in the 2012 cohort were less likely than their counterparts in the 1980 cohort to judge damage to public property as more culpable than damage to private property. The cohort differences were more evident in older children than in younger children. The results suggest that macro‐level contexts may play an important role in shaping children's judgments.

Many animal species have morphological and cognitive adaptations for fighting with others to gain resources, but it remains unclear how humans make fighting decisions. Non-human animals adaptively calibrate fighting behavior to ecological variables such as resource quantity and resource distribution. Also, many species reduce fighting costs by resolving disputes based on power asymmetries or conventions. Here we show that humans apply an ownership convention in response to the problem of costly fighting. We designed a virtual environment where participants, acting as avatars, could forage and fight for electronic food items (convertible to cash). In two experimental conditions, resources were distributed uniformly or clustered in patches. In the patchy condition, we observed an ownership convention — the avatar who arrives first is more likely to win — but in the uniform condition, where costly fights are rare, the ownership convention is absent.

The exchange of objects is a ubiquitous feature of children's play. Yet we know little about how children choose amongst the plethora of strategies at their disposal for getting and maintaining control of objects in the play space. In the present study, the methods of conversation analysis are applied to reveal Aboriginal children in remote Central Australia relying heavily on two ‘toy getting’ strategies: ‘gimme’ requests and grabs. Both strategies carry with them an expectation of compliance. The analysis will reveal that in the play session, this expectation of compliance arises from two situational factors: who owns the toy at the time of the request, and the request-maker's ‘entitlement’ to have the toy. The former can be signalled by various in-turn design features such as assertions of ownership, possessive pronouns and a range of justifications which point to various ownership rights. Entitlement is justified with explicit or tacit reference to ‘rules of the game’.

The psychological basis of ownership is a neglected area of research; the authors consider twenty-one disparate reasons why it is worth investigating.

An object's mental representation includes not just visible attributes but also its nonvisible history. The present studies tested whether preschoolers seek subtle indicators of an object's history, such as a mark acquired during its handling. Five studies with 169 children 3-5 years of age and 97 college students found that children (like adults) searched for concealed traces of object history, invisible traces of object history, and the absence of traces of object history, to successfully identify an owned object. Controls demonstrated that children (like adults) appropriately limit their search for hidden indicators when an owned object is visibly distinct. Altogether, these results demonstrate that concealed and invisible indicators of history are an important component of preschool children's object concepts.

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Abstract We propose that there is a powerful human disposition to track the actions and possessions of agents. In two experiments, 3-year-olds and adults viewed sets of objects, learned a new fact about one of the objects in each set (either that it belonged to the participant, or that it possessed a particular label), and were queried about either the taught fact or an unrelated dimension (preference) immediately after a spatiotemporal transformation, and after a delay. Adults uniformly tracked object identity under all conditions, whereas children tracked identity more when taught ownership versus labeling information, and only regarding the taught fact (not the unrelated dimension). These findings suggest that the special attention that children and adults pay to agents readily extends to include inanimate objects. That young children track an object's history, despite their reliance on surface features on many cognitive tasks, suggests that unobservable historical features are foundational in human cognition.

Five experiments investigated immediate memory for drawings of familiar objects in children of different ages. The aims were to demonstrate younger children greater dependence on visual working memory and to explore the nature of this memory system. Experiment 1 showed that visual similarity of drawings impaired recall in young (5-year-old) children but not in older (10-year-old) children. Experiment 2 showed that younger and older children were affected in contrasting ways when the temporal order of recall was manipulated. Experiment 3 explored a recency effect found in backward recall and investigated its sensitivity to the presentation modality of materials used to produce retroactive interference (RI). For younger children, recency was reduced by visual but not by auditory-verbal RI; for older children, recency was more sensitive to auditoryverbal RI. Experiment 4 confirmed the effect of visual RI on visual recency in young children and showed that the same RI had little effect on their recall of spoken words. These results confirm younger children dependence on visual working memory. A final experiment showed that the effects of visual similarity and visual RI are additive, suggesting that they reflect different modes of accessing stored visuospatial information. Implications of these findings for developmental issues and for the nature of visual working memory are discussed.

Bibliographical footnotes.

Legal theorists argue that the constitutional right to property is defined, in part, by the property beliefs of the community, and how they change; yet little is known about these beliefs. In each of the three present studies, subjects aged 4 to 15 years, and adults, rated story characters who refused to return objects to their previous owners. Subjects under 10 did not clearly differentiate loss or destruction of one's own from another's property (study I), or the rights of persons who acquired possession by theft, loan, finding, or gift (study II). Creative labor was considered a more legitimate basis for possession by 15-year-olds than by 10-year-olds or adults (study III). These results support the idea that children understand "own" in the same way as adults understand "on loan".

Group ownership is ubiquitous-property is owned by countries, corporations, families, and clubs. However, people cannot understand group ownership by simply relying on their conceptions of ownership by individuals, as group ownership is subject to complexities that do not arise when property is individually owned. We report 6 experiments investigating whether children ages 3 to 6 (N = 540) understand group ownership. In Experiments 1 and 2 children were asked who different objects belong to, and they appropriately judged that certain objects are more likely to belong to a group than to individual people. Experiments 3 and 4 investigated whether children understand the limits of group ownership. Children saw vignettes where agents modified or depleted property. Children ages 3 and older understood that individual members of a group should not deplete group-owned property, and children ages 5 and 6 understood that individual members should not modify group-owned property. Finally,

Young children often use simple rules of thumb to infer ownership of objects, but do they also understand ownership rights? We investigated whether 2- and 3-year-olds would react to violations of ownership rights in the context of newly made objects. In Experiment 1, children protested and made spontaneous reference to ownership when a puppet took away the child's object, but protested little when a third party's objects were at stake. Yet, 3-year-olds attributed ownership to the third party when asked ownership questions. Children's ownership claims were due to the effort invested in making new things, as they rarely used ownership protest after having handled raw materials (Experiment 2). Two- and 3-year-olds thus showed an appreciation of ownership rights for their own newly made objects. While 3-year-olds understood third party ownership, they may have lacked the motivation to intervene in ownership rights violations involving a third party.

Ownership is not a “natural” property of objects, but is determined by human intentions. Facts about who owns what may be altered by appropriate decisions. However, young children often deny the efficacy of transfer decisions, asserting that original owners retain rights to their property. In Experiment 1, 4–5-year-old and 7–8-year-old children and adults were asked to resolve disputes between initial owners and various types of receivers (finders, borrowers, buyers). Experiment 2 involved disputes both before and after transfers of ownership. At all ages participants privileged owners over non-owners and accepted the effectiveness of property transfers. Overall, children's intuitions about property rights were similar to those of adults. Observed differences may reflect older participants’ willingness to segregate property rights from other considerations in assessing the acceptability of actions.

Owned objects are typically viewed as non-fungible—they cannot be freely interchanged. We report three experiments (totalN=312) demonstrating this intuition in preschool-aged children. In Experiment 1, children considered an agent who takes one of two identical objects and leaves the other for a peer. Children viewed this as acceptable when the agent took his own item, but not when he took his peer’s item. In Experiment 2, children considered scenarios where one agent took property from another. Children said the victim could take back her own property from the perpetrator, but that she could not take an identical object belonging to the perpetrator. Finally, in Experiment 3A and 3B, children considered scenarios where a teacher could give a child either of two objects to play with—an object that the child had recently played with, or another object that looked the same. Children were more likely to say that the teacher should give the object recently played with when it belonged to the child, compared with when it belonged to the teacher. These findings are informative about the basis of judgments that property is non-fungible, and about young children’s representation of ownership rights. They show that children’s representation of ownership rights is not limited to principles protecting owners from being deprived. Our findings instead suggest that ownership rights are viewed as pertaining to individual objects.

Abstract Young children show competence in reasoning about how ownership affects object use. In the present experiments, we investigate how influential ownership is for young children by examining their explanations. In three experiments, we asked 3- to 5-year-olds ( N =0002323) to explain why it was acceptable (Experiments 10900093) or unacceptable (Experiment 2 and 3) for a person to use an object. In Experiments 1 and 2, older preschoolers referenced ownership more than alternative considerations when explaining why it was acceptable or unacceptable for a person to use an object, even though ownership was not mentioned to them. In Experiment 3, ownership was0002mentioned to children. Here, younger preschoolers frequently referenced ownership when explaining unacceptability of using an object, but not when explaining why using it was acceptable. These findings suggest that ownership is influential in preschoolers' explanations about the acceptability of using objects, but that the scope of its influence increases with age.

Ownership influences the permissibility of people's use of objects. Understanding ownership is therefore necessary for socially appropriate behavior and is an important part of children's social-cognitive development. Children are sophisticated in their reasoning about ownership early in development. They make a variety of judgments about ownership, including judgments about how ownership is acquired, who owns what, and ownership rights. Understanding how children reason about ownership can also inform broader questions about the nature and origins of ownership.

This study provides evidence that children give priority to ownership when judging who should use an object. Children (N = 269) and adults (N = 154) considered disputes over objects. In disputes between a character using an object and the owner of the object, children, as young as 3 years and as old as 7 years, sided with the owner, and did so more than adults. However, children aged 4 and older disregarded owners' rights in dilemmas where these were pitted against the need to prevent harm. These findings suggest that ownership is central in children's judgments about object use and constrain developmental accounts of how children acquire an appreciation of ownership.

Ownership is a central element of human experience. The present experiments were designed to examine the influence of psychological state on ownership judgments. In three experiments, 4-year-olds were asked to make ownership attributions about owners and non-owners who either desired or did not desire a gift. Despite exhibiting a clear sensitivity to the desires of others, children made accurate ownership attributions independent of individuals desires. At the same time, there are subtle influences of desires on children's ownership judgments, as well as subtle influences of ownership on children's desire judgments. Thus, the two factors are largely but not wholly distinct in young children's thinking.

Abstract Are Americans more individualistic and less collectivistic than members of other groups? The authors summarize plausible psychological implications of individualism-collectivism (IND-COL), meta-analyze cross-national and within-United States IND-COL differences, and review evidence for effects of IND-COL on self-concept, well-being, cognition, and relationality. European Americans were found to be both more individualistic-valuing personal independence more-and less collectivistic-feeling duty to in-groups less-than others. However, European Americans were not more individualistic than African Americans, or Latinos, and not less collectivistic than Japanese or Koreans. Among Asians, only Chinese showed large effects, being both less individualistic and more collectivistic. Moderate IND-COL effects were found on self-concept and relationality, and large effects were found on attribution and cognitive style.

Three experiments show that young children ( N 62=62384) use ownership to predict actions but not to infer preferences. In Experiment 1, 3- to 6-year-olds considered ownership when predicting actions but did not expect it to trump preferences. In Experiment 2, 4- and 5-year-olds, but not 3-year-olds, used ownership to predict actions, and 5-year-olds grasped that an agent would use his or her own property despite preferring someone else’s. This experiment also showed that relating an agent to an object interfered with 3- and 4-year-olds’ judgments that a more attractive object is preferred. Finally, Experiment 3 found that 3- and 4-year-olds do not believe that owning an object increases regard for it. These findings are informative about the kinds of information children use to predict actions and the inferences they make from ownership. The findings also reveal specificity in how children use ownership to make judgments about others, and suggest that children more closely relate ownership to people’s actions than to their desires.

Abstract Two studies compared toddler owners and non-owners of toys. Children of 24 and 30 months were supplied with toys and told that they were owners. In play with friends, owners were more likely than non-owners to maintain possession, claim toys verbally (‘mine’), and non-verbally, by attempting to regain their own toys in their friends' possession. Children communicated their ownership early in each episode and in preference to other information about the toys. Toddlers in both studies identified toys belonging to their friends and acknowledged their friends' ownership with possessive statements (‘yours’), and in Study 2, recognized the relationship between owners and their property by offering toys that their friends owned. In these ways, toddlers' actions were consistent with accepted ownership rights.

Abstract Sibling property disputes were observed in 40 families, each with a 2- and a 4-year-old child, to study the application of principles of entitlement. Conflict outcomes, parent support, and justifying arguments were each analyzed in disputes involving ownership, possession, sharing, and property damage. Ownership and possession each influenced the conduct and outcomes of disputes, with ownership taking precedence over possession in children's arguments and in dispute outcomes. Parents did not clearly support either principle on its own and were as likely to argue in terms of possession as ownership rights. Parents supported children's sharing and prohibited property damage, but conflict outcomes upheld these principles only when parents intervened. Analyses revealed the strong influence of young children who argued, with increasing differentiation and sophistication, for principles of entitlement that were not strongly endorsed by their parents. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

This study examined property conflicts in thirty-two 20- and 30-month-old peer dyads during eighteen 40-min play sessions. Ownership influenced conflicts. Both 20- and 30-month-old owners claimed ownership (090008mine090009) and instigated and won property conflicts more often than non-owners. At 30 months, owners also resisted peers090005 instigations more often than non-owners. Mothers090005 interventions supported non-owners more often than owners, in part because owners initiated conflict more frequently. Children who received mothers090005 support tended to win disputes. Finally, mothers090005 support of owners and children090005s adherence to ownership rights led to decreased conflict as relationships developed, supporting predictions based on theories concerning the social utility of ownership rights.

Abstract The purpose of this project was to investigate the maintenance of focused attention in the first 5 years. In Study 1, 67 children were seen at 1, 2, and 3.5 years of age in free play with a number of age-appropriate toys. The duration of focused attention increased significantly over the ages studied. At 1 year, the children's focused attention showed a decline within the session; at the 2 older ages, however, focused attention neither decreased nor increased. In Study 2, children at 2.5, 3.5, and 4.5 years were also seen in free play. The results replicated the significant increase in focused attention over age and the lack of change within the session. Older children focused attention significantly more on construction and problem solving than did younger children, and manifested less inattention by physical movement away from the toys. The observed development in focused attention, therefore, is probably related both to the increased variety and complexity of the child's activities and to increasing inhibitory control. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2012 APA, all rights reserved)

Human social life is structured by social norms creating both obligations and entitlements. Recent research has found that young children enforce simple obligations against norm violators by protesting. It is not known, however, whether they understand entitlements in the sense that they will actively object to a second party attempting to interfere in something that a third party is entitled to do—what we call counter-protest. In two studies, we found that 3-year-old children understand when a person is entitled to do something, and so they actively defend this person’s entitlement against unjustified interference from second parties. In some cases, they even enforce second-order entitlements, for example, in the case of ownership where an owner is entitled to entitle others to use the owner’s property.

Adults apply ownership not only to objects but also to ideas. But do people come to apply principles of ownership to ideas because of being taught about intellectual property and copyrights? Here, we investigate whether children apply rules from physical property ownership to ideas. Studies 1a and 1b show that children (60900098 years old) determine ownership of both objects and ideas based on who first establishes possession of the object or idea. Study 2 shows that children use another principle of object ownership, control of permission090000an ability to restrict others090005 access to the entity in question090000to determine idea ownership. In Study 3, we replicate these findings with different idea types. In Study 4, we determine that children will not apply ownership to every entity, demonstrating that they do not apply ownership to a common word. Taken together, these results suggest that, like adults, children as young as 6 years old apply rules from ownership not only to objects but to ideas as well.

Research indicates that in experimental settings, young children of 3–7 years old are unlikely to devise a simple tool to solve a problem. This series of exploratory studies done in museums in the US and UK explores how environment and ownership of materials may improve children's ability and inclination for (i) tool material selection and (ii) innovation. The first study takes place in a children's museum, an environment where children can use tools and materials freely. We replicated a tool innovation task in this environment and found that while 3–4 year olds showed the predicted low levels of innovation rates, 4–7 year olds showed higher rates of innovation than the younger children and than reported in prior studies. The second study explores the effect of whether the experimental materials are owned by the experimenter or the child on tool selection and innovation. Results showed that 5–6 year olds and 6–7 year olds were more likely to select tool material they owned compared to tool material owned by the experimenter, although ownership had no effect on tool innovation. We argue that learning environments supporting tool exploration and invention and conveying ownership over materials may encourage successful tool innovation at earlier ages.

In this study, we utilized transformed spatial mappings to perturb visuomotor integration in 5-yr-old children and adults. The participants were asked to perform pointing movements under five different conditions of visuomotor rotation (from 0 to 180 ), which were designed to reveal explicit vs. implicit representations as well as the mechanisms underlying the visual-motor mapping. Several tests allowed us to separately evaluate sensorimotor (i.e., the dynamic dimension of movement) and cognitive (i.e., the explicit representations of target position and the strategies used by the participants) representations of visuo-proprioceptive distortion. Our results indicate that children do not establish representations in the same manner as adults and that children exhibit multiple visuomotor representations. Sensorimotor representations were relatively precise, presumably due to the recovery of proprioceptive information and efferent copy. Furthermore, a bidirectional mechanism was used to re-map visual and motor spaces. In contrast, cognitive representations were supplied with visual information and followed a unidirectional visual-motor mapping. Therefore, it appears that sensorimotor mechanisms develop before the use of explicit strategies during development, and young children showed impaired visuomotor adaptation when confronted with large distortions.

Abstract Top of page Abstract 1Introduction 2Experiment 1 3Experiment 2 4General discussion 5Acknowledgments References Understanding ownership rights is necessary for socially appropriate behavior. We provide evidence that preschoolers' and adults' judgments of ownership rights are related to their judgments of bodily rights. Four-year-olds ( n =70) and adults ( n =89) evaluated the acceptability of harmless actions targeting owned property and body parts. At both ages, evaluations did not vary for owned property or body parts. Instead, evaluations were influenced by two other manipulations hether the target belonged to the agent or another person, and whether that other person approved of the action. Moreover, these manipulations influenced judgments for owned objects and body parts in the same way: When the other person approved of the action, participants' judgments were positive regardless of who the target belonged to. In contrast, when that person disapproved, judgments depended on who the target belonged to. These findings show that young children grasp the importance of approval or consent for ownership rights and bodily rights, and likewise suggest that people's notions of ownership rights are related to their appreciation of bodily rights.

When responding to ownership violations, children can focus on the victim's needs, the perpetrator's punishment, or both. Recent studies show that 3- and 5-year-olds are equally likely to respond to second- and third-party violations, and 3-year-olds return objects to their rightful owners. Children's interventions are consistent with justice for victims.

We report two experiments which support the theory that children’s understanding of ownership rights is related to their notions of body rights. Experiment 1 investigated 4- to 7-year-olds’ (N = 123) developing sensitivity to physical contact in their judgments about the acceptability of behaving in relation to owned objects and body parts. Experiment 2 used a simpler design to investigate this in 3- and 4-year-olds (N = 112). Findings confirmed two predictions of the theory. First, in both experiments, children’s judgments about ownership and body rights were similarly affected by physical contact. Second, judgments about both kinds of rights were yoked in development; age-related changes in judgments about ownership rights were paralleled by changes in judgments about body rights. Our findings have additional import for theories of ownership rights because they suggest that physical contact may be a crucial factor in whether behaviors targeting property are judged to be permissible.

ABSTRACT090000 Prior research demonstrates that understanding of theory of mind develops at different paces in children raised in different cultures. Are these differences simply differences in timing, or do they represent different patterns of cultural learning? That is, to what extent are sequences of theory-of-mind understanding universal, and to what extent are they culture-specific? We addressed these questions by using a theory-of-mind scale to examine performance of 140 Chinese children living in Beijing and to compare their performance with that of 135 English-speaking children living in the United States and Australia. Results reveal a common sequence of understanding, as well as sociocultural differences in children's developing theories of mind.