by Bruce Hood
WHO CAN OWN WHAT?
In 2010, Bret Carr filed a lawsuit in Florida challenging the will of his late mother who left around $11 million in assets and funds to look after her pet dogs.36 Some people leave their wealth not only to animals but also to art collections, buildings and lands that they want to preserve and protect. Clearly, people can leave their wealth to schemes set up to look after anything.
It does seem odd that animals and artefacts could be thought of as owners of inherited wealth. Even young children understand that it is usually people who own things. In one set of studies, children aged between six and ten were asked a series of questions about who could be owners, including humans, animals and artefacts.37 They were asked questions such as ‘Can a little baby own a blanket? Can a dog own a ball? Can a couch own a pillow?’ Although there were a few exceptions, on the whole even the youngest children thought that only humans could be owners. If the animal in question was a pet, however, then children would apply ownership rights. When my daughters first started to keep pets, they reasoned that the various bells and climbing frames in the cage belonged to their pets. They reasoned that possessions were an extension of identity. It would seem that when we establish unique identity, we use ownership as part of that concept. But, again, there are exceptions. Children initially believe that humans have to be conscious to own something.38 Someone who is asleep is not considered capable of owning.
These exceptions provide clues as to how children may be establishing ownership. Adults consider ownership as an extension of the individual irrespective of the state he or she is in – whether they are tied up, paralysed, asleep or in a coma. Even the dead can own property until it has been established who are the rightful heirs to their estate. It seems then that children must consider ownership as the capacity to act upon a thing, a legacy of what motivates the drive for possession in infants in the first place – the ability to control. Remember, young children think that whoever is interacting with an object is the legitimate possessor – a bit like demand-sharing observed among hunter-gatherers. They still do not understand that once ownership is established it remains a right of access unless it is transferred by the owner. This raises the untested prediction that if the youngest children understand theft is wrong, is it the case they consider that ownership eventually transfers if the thief continues to possess the stolen property?
You may consider this an obvious no, except that in both US and English law, a legal process known as ‘adverse possession’ entitles a transfer of ownership of property by occupation if the original owner does not contest the interloper who has taken possession for a period, usually at least ten to twelve years. Given enough time, squatters can legally claim ownership. Ownership is not for ever and unless you exercise your use of property, then others can take it away from you.
If establishing ownership requires a bit of sleuthing, then one of the strongest clues is who is likely to own a particular possession. Stereotypes emerge early and, increasingly, we are beginning to understand just how strong and influential they can be. At as early as three years of age, children are obsessed with identifying gender. Psychologists Carol Martin and Diane Ruble have likened toddlers to ‘gender detectives’, since they seek out gender information with which to construct their notions of what it is to be a boy or a girl.39 Not only do they start out as gender detectives but they become ‘gender police’, where they insist, for example, that only girls can own dolls or only boys can own toy soldiers as these objects are stereotypical of each gender. Of course, there are always exceptions and some parents try to find gender-neutral toys, but in general, there is good evidence that children themselves exhibit early preferences. These may have a biological basis as young female primates, both human and non-human, have a stronger preference for dolls compared to males when offered a choice of toys. There are even reports that young female chimpanzees use sticks as rudimentary dolls and care for them in an attempt to emulate their mothers.40
As the child develops more elaborate models of identity, including gender, race and age, they include within those concepts the appropriate possessions as typical of that group defined by the cultural context.41 Like Sherlock Holmes, children apply deductive reasoning in establishing ownership. In one study, three- to four-year-olds were shown two characters, a boy and a girl, who were each depicted playing with a beach ball separately.42 When asked who owned the ball, the children deferred to the first possession bias to assume the first child seen playing with the ball was the owner. However, in a second set of studies, rather than a beach ball the objects being played with included a toy truck, a jewellery box, football equipment and a doll. Presented with this additional information, children attributed ownership based on the gender stereotype of possession irrespective of who was seen to be playing with the object first. The possessions were reflections of the likely owner.
TEDDY BEARS AND BLANKETS
As children learn to solve who owns what, they increasingly view possessions as part of identity. One possession that young children will not share and will defend vigorously is their attachment object – usually a soft toy or blanket that they have had since they were infants. Children tend to be inconsolable when such items are lost. These are sometimes called ‘security blankets’ as they provide a sense of reassurance and often form part of a routine to settle the child. I’ve been researching attachment objects for over twenty years. It is such a peculiar, but common, behaviour that it must arise from a fundamental need in many of us to hold on to someone or something that is familiar. It is one of the strongest examples of psychological ownership, and one of the earliest. Where does it come from?
The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called these security blankets ‘transitional objects’, since they fill in as the child makes the psychological break with their mother.43 He thought that infants form such a strong bond with the mother that when she is not available the child fills the void with an object to transfer their emotional connection from the mother. Various estimates place the number of Western children who form emotional attachments to soft toys and blankets to be around 60 per cent.44 Interestingly, childhood attachment objects are not typically seen in the Far East, where studies have reported much lower levels of use.45 One explanation comes down to traditional sleeping patterns.46 In the West, middle-class families typically put infants into separate sleeping places from around the first year, whereas in traditional East Asian families children will continue to sleep with the mother well into middle childhood. To our Western eyes, this practice seems odd, but it is simply a cultural norm. In addition, many East Asian families, especially in the densely populated cities of Japan, sleep in small apartments where having your own bedroom is unusual. So not only does this parenting practice influence emotional attachment, because children traditionally are kept close to the mother, it also reduces the need to seek comfort from possessions.
When children are separated from their mothers to sleep, they have to establish a routine and these possessions become critical triggers. My elder daughter, Martha, started to attend a nursery in Boston at around the age of twelve months, when her mother had to go back to work, and we were instructed to provide a blanket for nap time, an established routine where all the children had to learn to settle down at the same time. We provided a garish, multicoloured, polyester fleece blanket, and very soon ‘Blankie’ became a regular part of Martha’s life – and still is today. Clearly, a pattern of association between comfort and an object was soon established. In our case, by the time she was two, Martha was inseparable from the blanket, which caused many moments of anguish whenever Blankie went missing.
Nor can attachment objects be easily replaced. In one study, we convinced three- to four-year-olds that we had built a machine that could duplicate anything, like a photocopier for objects or a 3D printer.47 We did this with a simple conjuring trick using two scientific-looking boxes with lights and dials. Objects were placed in one box, which was then ‘activated’ by pushing a b
utton. After some more noises and lights, the second box was opened to reveal a second, identical object. Children were convinced that this machine could copy any physical object to make another exactly the same. Of course, we had two identical-looking objects and there was a hidden experimenter putting the duplicate into the second box. We did this because we wanted to see if the child would agree to have their personal possession copied and, if so, which one they preferred to keep. The pattern was clear. If it was simply a toy they owned, they were indifferent to the copying and preferred the brand-new toy. It was cool after all. However, if it was their attachment object they wanted the original back. As if it was an original piece of art, they didn’t want a copy even if it was indistinguishable.
Maybe you never had an attachment toy. My younger daughter, Esmé, did not, even though she was raised in the same household as Martha. Why not? This is the type of question that parents often ask about their children. Why are they so different? This is where studies of identical and non-identical twins are so valuable in trying to tease apart the contributions of biology and environment to individual differences. One recent twin study found that attachment toy ownership is half to do with genes and half to do with the environment – especially for those children who spent longer times away from their mothers.48 My graduate student Ashley Lee, who is studying attachment object behaviour in adults, just happens to be an identical twin. She never had an attachment object whereas her sister, Rachel, still has hers. According to their mother, when she was a baby Rachel had to spend several months in hospital after getting an infection, where she was separated from the rest of the family. This is when she first became attached to her object.
This relationship with an inanimate object may start as a simple routine but it can soon change to something very different indeed. Many children act as if their attachment objects are alive, giving them names and worrying about whether they are happy or lonely. They spontaneously interact with them as if they have minds of their own. In psychological terms, they anthropomorphize them, or treat them as if they were human. Along with my colleague Thalia Gjersoe, we tested to see whether children believed that these possessions had mental lives.49 We did this by showing them a picture of an animal or another child’s toy and told them that, when placed in a box, the animal got lonely but the toy simply got dusty. We then asked the child what would happen to their attachment object if we left it in the box. Children responded that, while other toys might get dusty, their attachment objects were more like the animals, with sad thoughts and feelings.
You might imagine that children grow out of this behaviour, but many do not. Ashley investigates students who still have their attachment objects. My daughter Martha is now twenty-four and still has Blankie! Would they be willing to damage them? We couldn’t ask adults to damage their possessions so we used a bit of voodoo instead. We asked them to cut up pictures of their childhood toys while we measured their galvanic skin responses, which is basically an indication of how much sweat they produce. It’s one of the measures of stress used in lie detectors. Even though they knew that there was no potential harm that could come to their beloved possessions, the act of cutting up a picture was so symbolically distressing that their anxiety measures went wild.50 They were emotionally connected to their attachment objects.
Each year, I recruit subjects from our student population at the University of Bristol to take part in our studies. When I ask them about attachment objects, I always see a mixture of perplexed faces and giggles from those who are sheepish about this peculiar aspect of their personal lives. We normally find that around two-thirds of students remember having had special toys in childhood, and around half of them still have them at university. Clearly these are sentimental possessions that people are reluctant to discard because of their emotional value.
Up and down the country, adults are finding their partners’ filthy blankets and ragged dolls stuffed under pillows or in drawers. It’s a guilty secret that many are too ashamed to admit. Others are much more open. I have spoken to many adults who are quite happy to talk about the emotional relationship they have with their childhood attachment possessions. Sometimes their confessions can be quite embarrassing. I once talked about this research at a dinner party when a female guest, presumably more forthcoming after some wine, admitted that she always had to turn her teddy bear to face the bedroom wall when she brought boyfriends back. She was simply too embarrassed by what her teddy might see.
Sentimental ownership is common for humans but not normally observed in wild animals. They can be made to become emotionally attached to inanimate objects but only if you take them out of their natural environments. In the 1960s, Harry Harlow performed his infamous studies of raising infant macaque monkeys isolated from their mothers, providing them with ‘surrogate’ wire mothers that were either covered in soft terry towelling fabric to simulate fur or bare wire cages with a feeder attached.51 He was trying to establish whether infant monkeys would become emotionally attached to the mother who was a source of food or the mother who provided comfort. The research showed that the monkeys clung to the furry mother and, when distressed, they would seek reassurance from this surrogate, which suggests that primate attachment is mostly motivated for emotional security and not by the drive for food. Normally, a mother is readily available in the wild so there is no need for primates to make the choice.
Animals kept in captivity, however, have been shown to become spontaneously attached to possessions. As many dog owners discover, pets can form emotional attachments to toys just like human infants, especially when separated from their mothers. But, again, this is not a behaviour observed in their ancestor, the wolf. Dogs have emerged from a long process of domestication by humans, which is known to induce juvenilization in animals – an increase in the period and extent of dependency – so attachment to possessions may have been a by-product of this process. Human children, on the other hand, are almost totally dependent on others. And we grow up depending on others. We also spend our lives accumulating possessions in the belief that ownership is the root of happiness. Psychological ownership is a consequence of social evolution where we form emotional attachments to significant things – both people and possessions.
Dogs form emotional attachments to inanimate possessions (Image: courtesy Jo Benhamu)
BEYOND SIMPLE POSSESSION
We have established what makes humans unique when it comes to our relationship with possessions. Many animals fight over possessions, but humans evolved the concept of ownership as a way to establish control in our absence and to signal who we are. Like art, concepts are generated in the mind, but ownership, because it is a socially agreed convention, requires learning the rules. While the rules of ownership may be opaque, the need to possess is appreciated from an early age. Infants protest when someone tries to take their stuff away, but this is just a simple reaction to being dispossessed. Ownership is more to do with personal identity and not breaking the rules.
At first, ownership focuses on physical objects, though parents may be considered property in that infants expect exclusive rights of access. Owning land and ideas, on the other hand, are somewhat more sophisticated and appear much later in development. Even adults contest these. It would seem then that children first identify significant others such as family members, and then elaborate their mental photograph album of people with the possessions they own. The idea that we extrapolate from bodies and minds to possessions is consistent with one of the main themes of this book – that ownership represents an extension of our self-concept. If this is true, then our sense of self will differ depending on the social contexts we grow up in. What we can call ours depends on the mutually recognized conventions of ownership that we share with others. These rules are not cast in stone but change over time and between cultures.
When there is a property dispute, establishing ownership comes down to making a choice as to who has the strongest claim. But the strength of a claim depends on what a society v
alues the most. In Western societies, with our emphasis on the individual, the bias is for those who can exercise the most control, either through first possession or exclusive access. In other, more interdependent societies, these would not be considered the most important factors as need and communal value play greater roles, as evidenced by the hunter-gatherer tradition of demand-sharing. Wherever they grow up, children must learn the appropriate norms for their community or face the danger of being ostracized – something that must be avoided at all cost.
Our identities are socially constructed and that includes our attitudes towards ownership. In the distant past, our social groups may have been fairly restricted, but, as we are increasingly living together in greater and greater densities on a planet of limited resources and restricted size, that self-identity will be forced to realign with the needs of the many if we are to avoid the ultimate tragedy of the commons. To do that requires us to teach our children a set of ownership values that deny unbridled self-interest. One of the most important values to adopt is sharing with others, something that conflicts with our competitive instinct but is essential for co-operative living. Like ownership, sharing undergoes considerable development and cultural variation, which we examine next.
4
It’s Only Fair
AMERICANS WOULD PREFER TO LIVE IN SWEDEN
‘Do not worry about poverty, but rather about the unequal distribution of wealth.’
Confucius
When it comes to wealth and poverty, life is unfair. Throughout his presidency, Barack Obama called economic inequality ‘the defining problem of our time’ as the gap between the world’s rich and poor reached staggering proportions. In 2015, a Credit Suisse Bank report revealed that the top 1 per cent of the world’s population owned 50 per cent of the world’s wealth, whereas 70 per cent owned less than 3 per cent.1 In America the poverty gap has been increasing steadily over the years. In 2012, a typical company CEO earned over 350 times the salary of a typical worker, whereas it was just 20 times their salary only two generations earlier.2