Intuitions on ownership: The Achuar speakers of Amazonian Ecuador and English speakers of the USA

Cross cultural intuitions on ownership. Ulises J Espinoza, H. Clark Barrett. Human Behavior and Evolution Society 31st annual meeting. Boston 2019. http://tiny.cc/aa1w6y

Abstract: Property and ownership claims and the array of ways in which they are operationalized comprise a large portion of our cognitive attention; on a day to day basis there is a need to know what to buy, sell, share, borrow, dispute over, and render away. Contemporary work in psychology suggests that intuitions of ownership emerge early in childhood, independently of acculturation; first possession claims to items by children as early as 9 months old. There remains much that is not yet known about the psychology of ownership and how it plays out in particular cultural settings. To evaluate how different possible domains considered to be owned are morally assessed, Achuar speakers from Amazonian Ecuador and English speakers from the United States were given a set of vignettes designed to assess how judgments of ownership depend on the type of resource in question, and how it came to be acquired. These vignettes were designed to be minimally culturally laden and of similar cross-cultural interest. Initial analyses of how domains of ownership are morally assessed are presented, emphasis being placed on rights, duties, and obligations of the (potential) owners across different domains of ownership.