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. 2024 Sep-Oct;95(5):1770-1778.
doi: 10.1111/cdev.14092. Epub 2024 Mar 25.

Ownership-attributing intuitions are cross-culturally shared

Michał Białek  1 , Michal Mikolaj Stefanczyk  1 , Marta Kowal  2 , Piotr Sorokowski  1
Affiliations

Ownership-attributing intuitions are cross-culturally shared

Michał Białek et al. Child Dev. 2024 Sep-Oct.

Abstract

This study tested intuitions about ownership in children of Dani people, an indigenous Papuan society (N = 79, Mage = 7, 49.4% females). The results show that similar to studies with children from Western societies, children infer ownership from (1) control of permission, (2) ownership of the territory the object is located in, and (3) manmade versus natural origins of the object. By contrast, they did not (4) infer ownership from the first observed possession of an object. Additionally, Papuan children showed (5) an absolute first possession heuristic, whereby they assigned ownership to a person who achieved a goal, in contrast to a person who was first to pursue this goal but failed to be the first to claim it.

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References

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