by Bruce Hood
If three-year-old children intervene when they witness stealing, then why the bystander effect in adults? It turns out that the bystander effect is not due to apathy but rather a combination of ambiguity and fear. Many situations are ambiguous and, rather than dashing in, most of us prefer to tread lightly to establish what is going on. If someone is so brazen as to try to cut the chains off a padlocked bike, then we reason it must be his or hers in the first place. Adults, like children, infer that people interacting with objects are usually the owners, which is statistically more likely in a lawful society. Alternatively, if the person is someone who is not afraid of others, then that means they might be violent. In which case, is it really worth the risk of personal harm for the sake of someone else’s bike? Would they do the same for me? It’s simply not worth it.
The bystander effect does not always win, however. Adults are more likely to intervene when they witness a property violation if they are alone. In this situation, there is no one else to rely on. Such evaluations also depend on where the crime takes place. City urbanites are much less willing to intervene compared to those living in rural towns. It could be that in rural areas there is more willingness to challenge or less ambiguity about the situation. When we live in smaller communities, we tend to not only know our neighbours but identify others as strangers. People who live in smaller groups also feel more obligation and responsibility to look after their neighbours’ interests, including protecting and defending their neighbours’ property. The bystander effect disappears when the group witnessing something suspicious all know each other, which again makes perfect sense. Such a group reduces ambiguity, enables communication and, together, there is a shared common interest to protect against property crimes.38
TRAGEDY OF THE COMMONS
It is for the collective benefit of all of us that we take responsibility and police our resources. This need is increasingly more pressing as our species changes the planet we inhabit. Since the birth of modern civilization around 12,000 years ago, the human global population has rocketed from some 5 million to more than 7 billion people today. Not only were there fewer people before civilization got started but they lived in small migratory groups that were dependent on the vagaries of the environment. Civilization changed that. With our technological advances in health and wealth, our population has risen exponentially, reaching a size that now threatens our planet. Not only are there fewer natural resources now to exploit, but our industrial activities have changed the environment in ways that affect the climate, which, ultimately, will affect all life on Earth.
This precarious state of affairs was predicted in a 1968 paper by the late ecologist Garrett Hardin, published in the prestigious journal Science, on the dangers of over-population and entitled ‘The Tragedy of the Commons’.39 In it, Hardin drew attention to the problem of human behaviour as the major contributing factor. In short, people are motivated to reproduce, compete and act out of self-interest for themselves and their families. Hardin pointed out that the consequences of selfish behaviour were not necessarily intentional. Rather, it was in our human nature and, as such, he argued, there is no clear technological solution to changing human motivation.
Hardin considered the problem from the perspective of classical economics. In The Wealth of Nations (1776), the father of modern economics, Adam Smith, put forward the notion of an ‘invisible hand’ that operates to improve society. He wrote that an individual who ‘intends only his own gain’ is, as it were, ‘led by an invisible hand to promote … the public interest’. In other words, by acting out of self-interest, individuals produce cumulative changes in society for the better. Probably the clearest example of this is the relationship between markets and innovation. If some product is in short supply and there is high demand for it, innovations will arise to increase the availability of the desired good through technological and economic advances. This is what entrepreneurs are constantly looking out for – opportunities to provide solutions that will make them money.
This belief that individuals are the drivers of economic growth remains core to political perspectives that emphasize the autonomy of the individual as the most important factor to advance civilization. This logic may work reasonably well for economics (though we shall see in later chapters that it has problems), but when it comes to what’s best for society, Smith’s invisible hand is decidedly a bad one.
Writing in 1833, the mathematician and economist William Forster Lloyd presented a formula that explained why Smith was wrong.40 He gave the example of individuals allowed to freely graze their herds on communal pastures, or commons as they were known in England. Through their desire to prosper, spurred on by the competitive instinct, individuals would be motivated to increase the size of their herd, which would eventually lead to calamity. To the individual herdsman, the value of adding one more animal to his herd would be +1, but the cost of increased overgrazing would be divided among everyone using the commons. From the individual herdsman’s perspective, adding an extra animal makes perfect economic sense, but the problem is that everyone operates with the same logic. Eventually, everybody increases the size of their herds, until the land is overgrazed and the grasses die off, leading to the collapse of the commons.
Hardin took this example in his influential paper, calling it a tragedy because there was an inevitability that was clearly evident, but not solvable. The problem is that everybody on the planet is caught up in a real-life tragedy of the commons played out by individual nations that believe they have the lawful rights of ownership. Over the past generation, we have increasingly begun to understand Earth as a delicately balanced ecosystem, and that the right of destruction of resources by owners (jus abutendi, again) conflicts with the rights of us all to occupy a habitable planet. One country may have the right to cut down trees to make way for farming, but the consequences of destroying rainforest are catastrophic for the rest of us.
Since the beginning of human civilization, the planet has lost half of the trees that it previously supported.41 Fossil-fuel burning, the acidification of the oceans and all the other markers of human activity indicate that we are producing problems that will affect the future of life on Earth. Climate change is a direct consequence of human activity, but the necessary actions required to address the problem conflict directly with an individual country’s ownership rights to exploit its resources as it wishes. This is why international co-operation and treaties are the only way to combat the ecological disaster that threatens us, and why unilateral protectionism – as epitomized by the slogan ‘America first’ – is so short-sighted, dangerous and, ultimately, self-defeating.
The economist John Gowdy argues that our current dilemma was not inevitable, since for 90 per cent of human history we lived as hunter-gatherers and did not compete in an arms race of ownership.42 Ownership is a burden for nomadic peoples. Hunter-gatherers spent considerable amounts of time eating, drinking, playing and socializing. Ironically, they are, by definition, materially poor, but they regularly enjoy the sorts of leisure activities that only the very rich, who do not have to work, can afford today. Most hunter-gatherers actually have far more leisure time than modern people in the industrialized world. Hunter-gatherers typically work an average of three to five hours per day and often take a day or two off each week.43 Moreover, much of that work includes hunting, fishing, and picking fruits and berries, the very same activities that are considered recreational in the West. Jason Godesky – a primitivist with ambitions of forming a functional hunter-gatherer tribe in the future – believes that even the hardest possible life for a hunter-gatherer compares favourably to the most leisured life one can expect in the world’s most wealthy industrialized societies.44
While this utopian vision is somewhat sentimental and romantic, one cannot help but conclude that the pursuit of material wealth has led to our own current environmental predicament. But John Gowdy is not as pessimistic about the future as was Garrett Hardin, and he recommends a number of changes we need t
o make to counter the tragedy of the commons. Some of these are familiar, such as environmental sustainability, reduction of wealth inequality, social-security support and greater international co-operation.
Missing from that list, however, is an understanding of how we learn about ownership and shape it in the first place. It may arise from biological imperatives, but the concept of ownership is one that is constructed in the human mind and shaped during child development. If psychological ownership is really one of the root causes of our current situation of over-consumption and relentless materialism, then we must find ways of changing people’s perceptions. But before you can change perceptions, you need to know where these come from. This is the question we turn to next.
3
Origins of Ownership
WHO OWNS A BANKSY?
In 2010, the old Packard Automobile plant in Detroit, Michigan was being redeveloped when a picture of a child holding a bucket of paint and a brush and the message ‘I remember when all this was trees’ was discovered painted on a concrete wall that was scheduled for demolition. It turned out to be the work of the renowned British graffiti-artist Banksy, immediately recognizable by his iconic stencil images, his witty sense of humour, his daring, unobserved, guerrilla-style execution (often in the middle of the night), and most famous for his total anonymity. The general public does not know who Banksy is or what he looks like, and he never claims ownership of his art. Banksy simply acknowledges that he creates the images via his official website, pestcontroloffice.com – again, typical Banksy humour. If he doesn’t claim ownership of his labour, who owns a Banksy?
Very few of us, in fact, because they are so valuable. When it became known that a Banksy had been discovered at the old Packard plant, the local Detroit-based 555 Arts gallery removed the 7-by-8-foot, 1,500-pound cinder block of concrete with the intention of saving it from the bulldozers because the workmen would not have known what they were destroying.1 However, when the landowners discovered this rescue, they claimed the wall was worth over $100,000 and took the art gallery to court on the grounds of theft. Overnight, a worthless wall scheduled for demolition was valuable. The court had to decide who was the legitimate owner of the graffiti. The artist who painted it on the wall? The company that owned the land? The workmen who found the painting? Or the art gallery that put effort into removing and preserving the artwork? Eventually the Detroit Banksy case was settled with the 555 gallery paying $2,500 to the landowners for outright ownership. It was a good deal. Five years later, in 2015, the Banksy graffiti wall sold for $137,500 to a couple from California, much to the consternation of Detroit residents who thought that the work should have remained in Michigan as they believed Banksy had gifted it to their city.
Banksy seems to relish provoking situations that prod and poke at the concept of ownership. He challenges us to address not only what art is but who owns it. Each one of the claims for ownership described above can be called into question. All buildings are owned, either privately or publicly, and so the walls he adorns are not his to alter. Graffiti is considered defacement and generally devalues the property. In most Western societies, it is considered a form of criminal damage, punishable by fines and imprisonment. In the UK, the estimated cost of cleaning up graffiti in 2017 was £1 billion.2 Is a Banksy destruction or construction? In his home city of Bristol, the local officials have protected Banksy murals, giving them the status of public art. There are tours of his street art and, in 2009, the Banksy exhibition at Bristol City Museum generated £15 million for the city from visitors coming to admire his work.3 Others see it a different way. In April 2007, one of Banksy’s most famous pieces, on a wall near Old Street tube station in London, depicting the actors John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson’s Pulp Fiction characters, pointing bananas instead of guns, was painted over by London Transport workmen despite having an estimated value of more than £300,000.4 Asked to comment on the mural’s destruction, a Transport for London spokesman replied, ‘Our graffiti removal teams are staffed by professional cleaners not professional art critics.’
Ironically, Banksy’s most creative work to date was an act of destruction. It took place at Sotheby’s London auction house on 5 October 2018 during the sale of one of his iconic images of a girl letting go of her heart-shaped balloon. As soon as the auctioneer’s hammer came down on the sale, an alarm sounded from within the frame as the picture started to self-shred in front of the shocked crowd. In his video post on Instagram, Banksy revealed how he had built a shredder into the picture frame years earlier just in case it was ever sold at auction. He also posted a photograph of the telephone bidders assembled in the showroom looking on aghast at the spectacle, with the witty tag, ‘Going, going, gone …’ It was his most creative work because, as Banksy added, ‘The urge to destroy is also a creative urge – Picasso.’ Normally a half-shredded work of art would be rendered worthless by such destruction, but not a Banksy. The winning bidder decided to keep the remnants of the picture and frame as they were worth even more given the publicity that the stunt attracted. Banksy appears to be the King Midas of the art world, with everything he touches turning to gold.
Every time he produces a public work of art, Banksy reveals the tensions in the way that we establish ownership. The artist provides the intellectual property with his brilliant ideas and actual labour, but then abandons the product of his efforts, leaving others to fight over the ownership. Each Banksy creation is a reminder of Bentham’s dictum that ownership is a mere concept, a product of the mind.
Conceptual art was launched into the public mind by the French artist Marcel Duchamp, who displayed a common porcelain urinal, entitled Fountain, which he submitted to the first annual exhibition of the Society of Independent Artists in New York in 1917. The Society’s board of directors, however, bound by its own rules to accept all members’ submissions, took exception to Fountain on the grounds that it was indecent and not a work of art. The whole point of the Society of Independent Artists was to tear down the stuffiness and elitism of the art world that had dominated until then. The exhibition was supposed to have no juries, no judgements, no prizes and all the works were to be displayed in simple alphabetical order according to the artists’ surnames. Yet the board objected to one of the works of art on grounds of decency.
Disgusted, Duchamp reclaimed the urinal, which had been stuck behind a partition at the exhibition, and took a photograph of it to the leading New York gallery owner and photographer of the day, Alfred Stieglitz. He had a different reaction, writing of the work: ‘The “Urinal” photograph is really quite a wonder – Everyone who has seen it thinks it beautiful – And it’s true – it is. It has an oriental look about it – a cross between a Buddha and a Veiled Woman.’
All that survives of Fountain is the 1917 photograph, as the urinal was dumped soon after. After all, it was only meant to be a statement. Duchamp had deliberately provoked his fellow Society members because he wanted to challenge the concept of art. Some say the artist was inviting the audience to urinate on the concept of art, but, when he was interviewed in 1964, Duchamp said he was, ‘drawing people’s attention to the fact that art is a mirage’.5 Like ownership, art is elusive.
One of Duchamp’s replicas of Fountain in the Pompidou Centre, Paris (Image: author)
In a 2004 poll conducted by the sponsors of the Turner prize, Fountain was considered the single most important artwork of the twentieth century by leading figures in the art world.6 The original Fountain may be gone but there are replicas in prestigious art galleries around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern gallery in London and the Pompidou Centre, Paris. Conceptual art is now a genre of its own, with works exchanging hands for considerable sums of money. In 2002, one of the replica urinals that came from Duchamp’s studio was sold at auction for over $1 million – a large price to pay for a piece of art that exists only in the mind.
The reason that art is relevant to ownership is that both are conceptual. Our world is
full of concepts constructed by the human mind, but how? As a developmental psychologist, I have spent my career researching the development of concepts in children, in everything from their understanding of the physical world to belief in a supernatural one. In every realm, concepts appear to develop from basic, fundamental principles that we are born with and that become more sophisticated through experience. Likewise, ownership is a concept that develops in children from the primitive principle of possession – something that humans share with the rest of the animal kingdom.
Before there was ownership, there was possession. Possession is simply the control of physical access to some resource such as holding it, carrying it or even sitting upon it. As noted in the last chapter, many animals acquire and defend possessions. In child development, before there is the concept of ownership there is also possession. The psychologist Lita Furby has analysed the development of possessive behaviour and has come up with two principles of possession that operate around the world.7 Based on interviews with children aged from five years to adults in their fifties, all of them agree that possession gives you control over something. Secondly, they all agree that possessions can form part of your identity. This is the psychological ownership that we described in the first chapter that comes from seeing a personal connection with your property – an extension of your self.
Initially newborn infants have little control over objects, nor do they have a developed sense of self. And yet they have an intrinsic curiosity to interact with the world. The psychologist Robert White theorized that all animals, including humans, are motivated to produce effects in their environment, and that feeling of efficacy is a universally sought-after source of pleasure.8 When you watch your pets at play, it is quite clear that they get much satisfaction out of controlling various objects that they paw or bat repeatedly. These objects are in their possession because they are under their control. This desire for control is the motivating factor in Swiss child psychologist Jean Piaget’s theory of intellectual development where he described infants discovering the nature of the world around them by interacting with objects and learning about their properties. This is one of the reasons why young babies repeatedly hammer the table with their utensils or drinking cups, and why they love to push things off their high-tables to make parents pick them up – over and over again. Piaget recognized these behaviours as a way that the infant begins to explore the nature of the world around them, exert control over it and discover what is in their possession.