by Bruce Hood
Control also depends on contingency. Infants are particularly attracted to experiences that are contingent, or timed to their own actions. Turn-taking is one of the characteristics of many parent–infant interactions. This is why peekaboo is such a universally popular game played with babies in variations across the world, because it involves contingency.9 Through these fundamental drives for control and contingency, we establish possession of things, and also of our personal thoughts and actions. The American psychologist Martin Seligman proposed that ‘those “objects” become self that exhibit near-perfect correlation between motor command and the visual and kinesthetic feedback; while those “objects” that do not, become the world.’10
As adults, when we lose control of these contingencies, we experience a disconnect. We lose the sense of ownership of our thoughts and actions and experience depersonalization, a fractionation of our personality because the integrity and control of our self is compromised. In such psychotic states, we say that we are the ones who are possessed, as if another person or spirit has taken control of our minds and bodies. When there is a mismatch between the voluntary control of thoughts and actions, as occurs in a number of psychiatric conditions such as schizophrenia, patients experience delusions of external control and possession from elsewhere.11 In a sense, who we are both in mind and physical body comes down to what we exclusively control and therefore own.
CARROTS AND STICKS
If the urge to possess is borne out of a primitive drive to control the physical world around us, then parents generally allow infants access to most things that are not going to harm them. Infants start out as the apples of their parents’ eyes, the centre of family attention. The next time you visit someone with a toddler, take note how often they interrupt the conversation by bringing objects to show the parent. This is a common way to command attention and control the situation, which is why much of the social interaction with parents during these early years involves physical objects.12
Infants are curious animals who want to push the boundaries of exploration. With increased mobility, they suddenly have access to most of the objects in their environments. However, these encounters could often result in damage or destruction, which is why adults and older siblings try to curb the child’s curiosity. This is when infants start to learn about restricted access and what is and what is not under their control. Objects which are under someone else’s control thwart feelings of possession when the child tries to explore them. This gives rise to an appreciation of things being out of bounds, whereas those objects that infants are at liberty to control belong to them.
When they do interact with peers, the youngest toddlers are also more likely to do so with an object rather than through speech. They know which toys to take that will upset their sibling most.13 Outside the family home, when the toddler enters the nursery, they embark on a campaign to take control over all the objects that they can possess. Some of the earliest observational studies revealed that three-quarters of quarrels between eighteen- to thirty-month-olds in a nursery were disputes over possession of toys.14 When there are only two toddlers present, then these disputes rise to around 90 per cent. Obviously, the ‘first possession rule’ from the animal kingdom is not fully operational at that age. By the time they reach three years old, these arguments drop to around half of all disputes.
Initially children prefer the toys that others like the most. It is not uncommon for toddlers to drop a toy in their possession and go after an identical one simply because it is in the possession of another. Long before they are aware of status symbols, toddlers appreciate the value of acquiring stuff that others want. Initially toddlers are fairly self-centred when they play with objects, but this soon shifts to increased joint play with their peers which involves toys.15 As the child psychologist Edward Mueller described, ownership of toys is the ‘carrots and sticks’ of social development, fostering social interaction both by invitation and by demand.16
Possession also becomes a means to establish where you are in the nursery pecking order. Taking control of objects is far more frequent than hitting, and arguably a more salient characteristic of dominance than violence, which is transient and likely to lead to retaliation or punishment.17 When it comes to ownership, what is remarkable is that toddlers may bring their home environment experiences into the nursery. One study showed that toddlers who take objects relatively frequently from their peers have mothers who take things relatively frequently from them; conversely, those toddlers who offer objects more frequently to their peers have parents who offer things more frequently to them.18
Territorial disputes and aggressive possession tend to decline over the pre-school period and be replaced by negotiation. This is where language plays an important role in settling ownership disputes. Children who are language-delayed continue to rely on brute force to claim ownership.19 No wonder, then, that these children are the ones who are rejected by their peers. Boys, who are comparatively more aggressive and slower to communicate compared to girls, are also the ones most likely to resort to violence when it comes to ownership disputes. They are also less likely to share.20 Child psychologists have long argued over whether male aggression is a natural inclination or cultural stereotype, but the universal language delay in males is biologically rooted.21 Could it be that the inability to negotiate over possession has its origins in this aggression, or is the inability to negotiate possession the origin of this aggression?
One intriguing shifting pattern observed over this period of early childhood is that dominance hierarchies tend to be the first to emerge, with friendship structures following and altruistic structures developing later still. Children learn to wield ownership as a means to establish themselves socially, first by force, then by co-operation and finally by reputation. ‘Mine’ may be a very small word that children first learn to use, but it remains one of the most powerful in a world dominated by ownership.
IS THAT YOURS?
Many of the property dilemmas we face involve absent owners. Imagine you are on a long, tedious train journey without a companion to talk to or a smartphone to alleviate the boredom. You spot an interesting magazine you would like to read on an empty seat. Determining whether you can pick it up or not comes down to working out who it belongs to. Is it the woman who is sitting in the seat next to the magazine? Is it the man who was sitting there a moment ago but who got off at the last stop? Or does it belong to the train company, which often distributes free promotional materials for passengers to read? Maybe somebody put the magazine there to reserve the seat while they go off to the buffet carriage. Is the magazine owned or not? Your theory of mind engages as you try to solve this puzzle. Or you may not care and simply pick it up, but most of us are sensitive to ownership and conditioned not to offend by taking without permission. At the very least, we would ask the woman first before picking it up. After all, she is closest to it and may have a priority claim over it.
For trivial items, such as magazines, we probably don’t agonize over ownership, but with most valuable possessions we do: land, in particular, and where we can and cannot go. Security guards, gates and fences protect many restricted areas, but others are less clear where trespassing can have lethal consequences. In the US, innocent trespassers have been shot and killed by homeowners. Sometimes the trespassers are intoxicated, sometimes they’re lost, or sometimes they’re foreign visitors and don’t appreciate the homeowner’s right to use deadly force to defend their property.22
Contrary to widely held assumptions, the use of lethal force for home defence is not legal in the US, but in many states it is perfectly acceptable to shoot and kill a trespasser if one fears for one’s safety. Based originally on English law that came over with the colonists, the ‘Castle Doctrine’ is the right to use force to defend property and can be traced to the seventeenth-century lawyer Sir Edward Coke, who wrote that ‘a man’s house is his castle’.
Trespassing can be unintentional. There are even cases of Pokémon Go players
who, while following the GPS on their smartphones to capture virtual cartoon creatures, have been fired upon for wandering on to private property.23 Every year some hapless individual is shot, supposedly in self-defence, but in reality it’s because they did not have permission to be on the property. But how do you know when you are trespassing? In some cultures, the concept of trespassing does not even exist. You have to know the conventions and learn to read the signs, even when they are not visible.
Humans use signals to demarcate territory because they are a proxy for a person. Names, addresses, signs and flags all indicate ownership. However, sometimes there are no markers to indicate ownership. If you visit one of the many US National Parks, such as Yellowstone in Wyoming, and happen to see an interesting stone lying on the ground, you might want to take it home. However, despite its being a natural object, created in the bowels of the Earth millions of years ago, and that no one but you is aware of, you are, nevertheless, prohibited from taking it.24 Many parks now have signs telling visitors that natural things cannot be removed. You cannot take ownership of flowers and rocks from many National Parks because in a sense everyone owns them – they are owned by the State. The trouble is, how would you know? One stone looks much the same as any other. Ownership controls each and every one of us and we have to abide by it or face the consequences, but the rules are not always evident. How do we acquire something so intangible as ownership?
For the developing child, there are two plausible routes to establishing ownership: visual association and verbal instruction. Simple visual association leads infants to assume a degree of connectedness between people and things that they observe on a regular basis. They see Mummy speaking on her smartphone every day so they come to assume that this object is part of who she is. Identifying specific people with specific objects is a skill that they have probably had since they were twelve months old at least.25 However, establishing ownership relationships also requires some deliberate interaction with the object that is fairly exclusive. Otherwise, infants would be making associations with just about every type of household object paired with a person they see on a daily basis. It would become an overwhelming amount to keep in their tiny minds – refrigerators, cups and cutlery, televisions and so on that do not really reflect exclusive ownership per se. Rather, having something in your possession and interacting with it seems to trigger ownership assumptions.26
Once the visual association is established, children spontaneously verbally label the object with the person they associate with it. Scholars of early language development have noted how common it is for infants to point at objects associated with someone, such as a smartphone, and say ‘Mummy’, as if to illustrate that there is an early appreciation that objects are an extension of individual identity. This label can then be reinforced and elaborated to identify the name of the object: ‘Yes, that’s right – that’s Mummy’s phone.’ However, at no point would a typical child point at her mother and say, ‘Phone’. This shows that before their second birthday, infants understand the relationship between people and possessions as one of owner and the stuff they own.
Toddlers don’t just use language to discover who owns property; they use it to claim possession. When we hear, ‘This is John’s’, because it is a possessive phrase, then we know that it belongs to him. Young toddlers appreciate this, but then can over-apply the command as if establishing ownership simply requires saying, ‘Mine!’ Studies of peer interactions between eighteen-month-olds reveal that the possessive pronoun ‘mine’ was most frequent when grabbing toys from another child.27 Children with siblings also use possessive pronouns earlier and more frequently in their speech than those without older siblings, indicating that children use ‘mine’ to verbally stake their claim when there is potential competition.28
By the time they reach their second birthday, children can also refer to possessions when the owner is not present. If they are shown a familiar possession from a family member, they can answer the question, ‘Who does this belong to?’ with ‘Daddy’ or ‘Mummy’.29 If you think about it, this seemingly simple ability of identifying someone’s possessions when they are not around is actually a considerable achievement. It demonstrates that the concept of ownership exists in the minds of pre-schoolers as thoughts of absent individuals and the stuff they own. The ability to represent the relationship between people and their property, when they are not present together, is a level of conceptual understanding that stretches the mind further still.
Learning by association and labelling is all very well, but how do you establish ownership when dealing with new people and unfamiliar items on a first-time basis, which make up most cases in real life? How do you work out whose magazine it is on the train? When it comes to understanding the world, children look for patterns to establish general principles. The child psychologist Ori Friedman has spent the past ten years studying how children work out who owns what. Like little Sherlock Holmeses, he argues that children are intuitive sleuths, using deduction to recreate the history of an item so as to determine its likely owner. To do this, they apply a set of rules. They consider what can and cannot be owned.
WHAT CAN BE OWNED?
Imagine walking in the park and spotting three items on the ground: a pinecone, an old bottle cap and a diamond ring. Which of these items are owned? It seems fairly obvious to most adults. One is natural and the other two are manufactured. Of the two manufactured items, one is likely to have been discarded whereas the other is likely to be lost. From at least three years of age, children understand that pinecones are natural objects and not as likely to be owned as diamond rings, which are man-made. But consider a leaf you see on someone’s desk. Is this owned? You are going to reach different conclusions about ownership if their office window is open and it is a windy day with trees outside, compared to finding the same leaf on an office desk on the thirtieth floor of a skyscraper.30 In the first case, there was probably no intention to acquire the leaf but simply the effects of the wind. As for the leaf in a skyscraper, someone must have intentionally put the leaf there and so it probably has some significance to someone.
Intended effort is one signal of the production of property. Like many doting parents, I have expressed gratitude for the leaves, sticks, stones and other natural things collected by my children. Our kitchen used to be festooned with our infant daughters’ works of art that to outside observers must have looked more like scraps with squiggles. Not so. A lot of effort and intention had gone into these creations. As my colleague Melissa Allen has argued, when it comes to art, it is the intention, not the craftsmanship, that determines what it is. It is the intention of the creator that defines art – something that children understand from the age of two.31
Establishing intentions, goals and effort are all factors in our ownership decisions when we are asked to adjudicate in property disputes. Just as the courts argue over ownership of a Banksy, is it any surprise that children and cultures reason differently about ownership? In our research, we have shown that pre-schoolers, like adults, initially believe whoever put in the effort to create or acquire something is the rightful owner.32 However, they don’t care about who owns the original materials that are used in the process. Three- to four-year-olds think that taking someone else’s modelling clay to make a new object is fair and gives them ownership rights, whereas adults are more likely to ask who owns the clay. We have found that the bias towards creative effort over material first possession is true in other cultures too, except that Japanese adults are much more likely than British adults to be concerned about where the material came from.33 This suggests that, in comparison, Japanese adults are much more sensitive over taking possession of another’s material irrespective of the creative act. British adults also take into consideration whether labour significantly alters the value of the newly created object. If an artist like Banksy puts in the effort to transform a worthless block of concrete into a work of art then they are considered the rightful owner, compared to the artisan
who takes valuable gold and makes a piece of jewellery.34 It is the relative increase in wealth through effort and labour that is considered to be the most important factor.
The amount of effort and the skill in creating something influences our decision about who owns an object. But how to judge that skill? A Jackson Pollock painting might look like an explosion in a paint factory to some, but for others his creative genius makes the canvas worth millions of dollars. Some paintings are considered graffiti, whereas others are masterpieces. Then there are works that to the untrained eye simply look like blank canvases but sell for exorbitant amounts of cash. In 2014, a white-on-white painting by the American artist Robert Ryman sold for $15 million.35 When it comes to conceptual art, it is the intention of the artist that determines whether something qualifies as property worth owning.