Children's endorsement of ownership attributes

Journal of Economic North-Holland

Psychology

10 (1989) 63-75

CHILDREN’S ENDORSEMENT OF OWNERSHIP ATIRIBUTES

*

Fiona CRAM and Sik Hung NG University of Orago, Dunedin, New Zealand Received

January

19, 1988; accepted

January

26, 1989

Children’s understanding of private ownership was examined by noting the attributes they used to endorse ownership. It was hypothesized that with increasing age children’s endorsement of higher level (i.e. contractual) attributes will increase, and their rejection of low-level (i.e. physical) and the lowest-level (i.e. egocentric) attributes will increase also. Children (n = 172) between the ages of 5 and 12 years were shown computer generated cartoons depicting eleven ownership attributes representing the various levels. The results of the contractual and physical attributes supported the hypothesis; those of the egocentric attributes showed a trend in the hypothesized direction. There were no significant effects due to gender.

Children often claim to be ‘mine’ things that do not actually belong to them. They may also feel free to transfer another person’s private possession to someone else as if it were for public use. As a consequence, they get into trouble with the rightful owner and with school rules. Such trouble may be traced to the wilful disrespect of other people’s private property; more often, however, it arises from children’s genuine ignorance of ownership rights, or from their ‘misconception’ of the basis of ownership. It is important, therefore, to examine how children develop an awareness of private property and a mature, adult-like conception of the bases of ownership. Moessinger (1975) interviewed pairs of Swiss children aged 4 to 15 years, and asked them to divide a gift of trees between themselves. Before the division, they were told that there were already trees planted * This research was supported by an Otago Research Grant (No. 14-751) to the second author. The authors wish to thank Brian Manly for his help with the Mantel statistical test, and Mel Pipe for her constructive comments on the research. Authors’ address: S.H. Ng, Dept. of Psychology, University of Otago, P.O. Box 56, Dunedin, New Zealand. F. Cram is also at the above address.

0167-4870/89/$3.50

0 1989, Elsevier Science Publishers

B.V. (North-Holland)

F. Cmm, S. H. Ng / Ownershtp attributes

64

in their other.

own gardens The

crucial

and that

part

one garden

of the interview

had more

trees

was to ascertain

than

the

children’s

awareness of the garden trees as personal possessions by noting whether the children would exclude the garden trees from the division, and if so, whether

they did this for the ‘right’

reasons.

The youngest

children,

it

was found, simply ignored the garden trees and divided the gift in a playful, give and take, fashion. Older children included the garden trees in the division and tried to ensure that they each had the same aggregate number of trees. The oldest children excluded the garden trees from their divisions and offered arguments indicating (a) an awareness of the garden trees as private property, and (b) a respect for the rights of private ownership. Using pocket money instead of garden trees as an example of private property, Jhaveri (1986) replicated Moessinger’s age-related results among 8- to 15year-old children in New Zealand and in Bombay, India. A similar age-related development toward the understanding of private property is also evident from other studies on possession and ownership (summarized by Stacey 1982; also Berti et al. 1982), stealing (Burris 1982), capitalist economic socialization (Cummings and Taebal 1978), and beliefs about upward social mobility and wealth equalization (Leahy 1983). What remains unclear is what attributes of garden trees and pocket money might have led the older children to regard these properties as private and therefore nontransferrable. To answer this question, we need first of all to compile a fairly complete list of attributes which children, rightly or wrongly, use to define a property as private. Beaglehole (1931), Furby (1980), and Berti et al. (1982) have suggested the following attributes: physical contact; current or past use; custody (e.g., finding); given as a gift; acquired through work, purchase, competition, or forced appropriation; and inherited. The above attributes can be divided into two subgroups: (1) physical attributes and (2) contractual attributes. Physical attributes (physical contact, use, custody, acquired through forced appropriation), can justify only ‘transitory’ (Newman 1978) or ‘accidental’ (Miller and Johnson-Laird 1976) ownership. That is, people possess and have the right to use an object only as long as they are in physical contact with it; they do not have permanent ownership over the object nor do they have the right to transfer ownership of the object (Miller and JohnsonLaird 1976). Contractual attributes (given as a gift; acquired through work, purchase, competition; inherited), on the other hand, are rightly

F. Cram, S.H. Ng / Ownership attributes

65

used to justify permanent or ‘inherent’ ownership (Miller and Johnson-Land 1976). The owner does not have to stay in contact with the possession to remain its owner and he or she also has rights of transfer whereby ownership of the possession can be legally granted to another person(s). That is what adults think. Young children, however, may infer ownership from contact, custody and use of an object (Berti et al. 1982; Stacey 1982) and think that these attributes, rather than the more abstract attributes, will justify permanent ownership. Older children, on the other hand, may become aware of and endorse the more abstract and legalistic attributes. These children are more active in the acquisition of their own possessions and therefore have more experience of the legal aspects of ownership (Furby 1978). In addition to physical and contractual attributes, there are ‘egocentric? attributes which very young children may be fond of using. For example, they may justify possession or ownership based on their liking of an object, on their appearance (e.g., ‘This is mine because I am pretty’), or on having lost a similar object. The use of these attributes reflects a confusion between ownership and personal desires. Whereas previous studies have used a single attribute method (e.g., garden trees, pocket money) to examine property awareness, the present study employed a multiple-attribute approach to investigate more directly those attributes which children at different ages use to infer or claim ownership. The hypothesis guiding this research was that with increasing age children’s endorsement of the higher-level (i.e. contractual) attributes, and their rejection of the lower-level (i.e. egocentric and physical) attributes will both increase.

Method Subjects To increase the generalizability of the results, subjects were drawn from four Dunedin (New Zealand) schools which had a cross-section of children from different socio-economic backgrounds. Three groups were sampled (5-6, 8-9, and 11-12 years). There were 57 subjects (32 males and 25 females) in the youngest group (mean age = 5.7 years, s.d. = 0.4 years), 56 subjects (24 males and 32 females) in the middle

F. Cram, S. H. Ng f ~ners~i~

66

attributes

group (mean age = 8.2 years, s.d. = 0.5 years), and 59 subjects (32 males and 27 females) in the oldest group (mean age = 12.8 years, s.d. = 0.4 years). The majority of subjects were Caucasian. Procedure All subjects were individually interviewed during school hours. At the beginning of the interview the experimenter established a rapport with each subject by introducing herself and telling the subject that she was going to show her or him some cartoons and that after each cartoon some questions would be asked. The child was assured that the questions were not a test and that there were not necessarily any right or wrong answers. The experimenter gave each subject the following verbal introduction to the cartoons: ‘I’m now going to show you my cartoons. They are about a shop which has a lot of different things in it. There are sweets, books and magazines, fruit and vegetables, cans of food and many other things. Lots of people come into the shop wanting these things from the shopkeeper. In the cartoons you are going to see some children coming into the shop and asking for something or being offered something. I want you to tell me whether they will be allowed to keep these things and take them home with them.’ Eleven cartoons were then shown to each subject using an Apple Macintosh computer. Each cartoon illustrated one of 11 attributes (see table 1). The characters involved in each cartoon were the shopkeeper and either a young boy (for male subjects) or a young girl (for female subjects). The conversation that occurred during the cartoons was depicted by ‘comic-type’ voice boxes above the speaking character’s head. Cartoons for four of the attributes (i.e. liking, physical appearance, losing possession, acquired through purchase), followed a similar format - the girl/boy asked the shopkeeper for an object (e.g., ‘Can I please have an apple?‘), and then gave a reason for wanting it that involved an attribute (e.g. ‘Because I like it’). For the remaining seven attributes that did not pertain directly to shop transactions (i.e. given as a gift; acquired through work, competition prized, forced appropriation; finding; current usage; inherited), the conversation be-

F. Cram, S.H. Ng / Ownership attributes Table 1 Transcripts

67

of attribute cartoons.

Attribute

Transcript

Liking

Can I please have some chocolate to take home? Why? Because I like it. Can I please have an apple to take home? Why? Because I’m pretty/handsome. Can I please have a book about drawing? Why? Because I lost my one. You can have this bag of sweets since you ran some errands. You can have a can of coke as a present. Can I please have a poster for my room? Why? Because I have some money to pay for it. I found a whistle outside the shop door. I lost my whistle last week. Can I keep it and take it home with me? I won first prize in the shopkeeper’s colouring contest. The prize is a camera. Can I keep it? Can I take it home with me? Two boys are fighting ouside the shop. Why? It was over a soccer ball. The bigger boy knocked the other one to the ground and took the ball. SK (to C): I have been using this pen all week, I may as well keep it. SK (to C): I hear that your auntie died and left you her watch.

Physical appearance

Losing possession

Earned Gifr Purchased

Found

Competition prize

Forced appropriation

Current usage Inherited

C: SK: C: C: SK: C: C. SK: C: SK (to C): SK (to C): C: SK: C: C: SK: C: C: SK: C: C: SK: C:

Nate: SK = shopkeeper, C = child character.

tween the shopkeeper and the girl/boy described the turn of events leading to the object being in the possession of the character. For subjects in the youngest and middle groups the contents of the voice boxes were read aloud by the experimenter unless a subject expressed a strong desire to read for himself/herself. In this case the subject read the contents of the voice boxes aloud with the experimenter correcting and assisting as necessary. Subjects in the oldest group read the voice boxes silently and without difficulty. After each cartoon the experimenter asked the subject ‘Can the boy/girl keep the (object requested). Can s/he take it home with him/her?‘. This was followed by questions about the reasons for the

subject’s answer. Where clarification of the subject’s responses was deemed necessary, further questions were asked to ascertain whether or not the subject inferred ownership from the attribute used in that cartoon. The interviews were audio-recorded and Iater transcribed for coding and analysis.

Results Two adult judges, who were unaware of the subject’s age or gender, read the subject’s response(s) to an attribute. They then independently judged whether or not the subject endorsed the attribute. They repeated this procedure for all other subjects, and then for all other attributes. For the contractual attributes, endorsement of the attribute with good reason was the mature response; for the physical and egocentric attributes, rejection was the mature response. A mature response was coded as 1, all other responses were coded as 0. The agreement between judges for each attribute ranged from 82.1% to 96.9% with a mean agreement of 90.4%. Where disagreements between judges occurred these were discussed and the final coding agreed upon. Categdzation

5j

attributes

To check the validity of the categorization of attributes into three subgroups (i.e. egocentric, physical, contractual), a Mantel test for matrix association was carried out (Manly 3986). Essentially, the test compares the proportions of within- and between-category agreements. Consider two categories each with two attributes (A, and A,, B, and B2). The proportion of subjects who respond to A, in the same way as they respond to A, (agreement within category A) should be greater than the A/B,, A,/B2, AZ/B,, or AZ/B2 (between-catego~) agreements. Likewise, the proportion of category B agreements should be greater than the proportion of between-category agreements. The greater the comparison is in favour of the within-category agreement, the more valid is the categorization, the significance of which can be tested against 1,000 computer-generated random permutations of the distance

F. Cram, S. H. Ng / Ownership attributes Table 2 Percentages

of subjects

giving mature

responses

to the ownership

69

attributes. Oldest

Total

98.2 74.5 71.4

98.2 93.2 84.7

95.2 82.9 76.2

50.9 76.8 35.7

87.5 96.4 30.2

89.1 100.0 58.5

75.6 91.2 40.0

10.5 24.6 64.9 31.6 35.1

60.7 58.2 96.4 82.1 83.9

76.3 76.3 100.0 91.5 96.6

49.4 53.2 86.8 68.6 72.1

Attribute

Youngest

Middle

Egocentric attributes Liking Physical appearance Losing

89.3 80.4 71.9

Physical attributes Finding Forced appropriation Current Usage Contractual attributes Earned Gift Purchased Competition Prize Inherit

matrix. The result of the Mantel test showed an acceptable level of significance (G = 1.90, p = 0.052) in support of the categorization. ’ Attribute

acceptance

The percentages of children who gave mature responses to the attributes are shown in table 2. Except for losing, most subjects gave mature responses for the egocentric attributes. Mature responses for the concrete attributes of usage and finding was much lower, especially by the youngest group. The oldest group and, to a lesser extent, the middle group generally gave mature responses for the abstract attributes. For each attribute, a two-way classification table comprising the two response categories (mature, other) and age (youngest, middle, oldest), was analysed using a log linear model of chi square. (The data were collapsed across gender as no significant main or interaction effects involving this factor were found when it was included in previous analyses.) To overcome the problem created by zero cells, which occurred in the forced appropriation and purchased attributes, a value ’ G = (Z-Expected (SE) = 0.62.

value)/SE

= 1.90, where

Z = 22.49, Expected

value = 21.32, Standard

Error

70

F. Cram, S.H. Ng / Ownership attributes

Table 3 Log linear chi square analysis of attributes: Summary of significant effects due to mature/other responses and/or age ( p < 0.005). Attribute: Effect(s)

df

x2

Egocentric attributes Liking: Response category Physical appearance: Response category Losing: Response category

167.3 80.4 49.5

Physical attributes Finding: Response category Response category X age Forced appropriation: Response category Response category x age

46.2 21.6 130.9 20.3

Contractual attrrbutes Earned: Response category X age Gift: Response category x age Purchased: Response category Response category X age Competition prize: Response category Response category x age Inherit: Response category Response category x age

59.1 32.8 99.1 35.0 24.0 54.8 34.1 61.0

of 0.5 was added to all cells in the classification table. This procedure is suggested by Goodman (1970, in Knoke and Burke 1985) and causes the test to be more conservative. If the hypothesis were true, there should be a significant interaction between age and response category showing the mature responses increased with age, for each attribute. In view of the large number of tests, eleven in all, p-level was set at 0.005. Table 3 summarizes the significant results. For all three egocentric attributes (liking, (I) Egocentric attributes. physical appearance, losing), there was a significant main effect for response category (mature responses outnumbered other responses). The lack of an interaction effect shows no significant increase in mature responses with age. There were a significant main effect due to (2) Physical attributes. response cateogry and a significant response category X age interaction effect for the finding and forced appropriation attributes. The interactions can be represented in terms of the percentage of mature responses

F. Cram, S.H. Ng / Ownership aitribuies

Old

Mlddle AGE

Fig. 1. Percentage attributes.

71

GROUP

of mature

responses

for the finding

and

forced

appropriation

ownership

plotted against age. As the age intervals are not equal, the interval being smaller between the two younger groups than between the middle and old groups, a more accurate representation of the interaction effect is to adjust the axis to correspond to the true intervals. As shown in fig. 1, for both attributes, especially for the finding attribute, the major increase was from the youngest to the middle group. For all attributes there was a significant (3) Contractual attributes. response category x age interaction. Each attribute showed a steep increase in the percentage of mature responses from the youngest to the middle group and a reduced increase from the middle to the old group (fig. 2). Conceptual level Next, a subject’s responses within each subgroup of attributes were considered as a whole. The purpose was to ascertain the subject’s level of maturity. To qualify as mature on the egocentric attributes, subjects had to give mature responses to at least two out of three attributes in this subgroup. Similarly for the physical attributes, subjects had to give mature responses to at least two of the three attributes in this sub-

F. Cram, S.H. Ng / Ownership attributes

72

Earned G11t Purchased Comwtition Inherit

0-m

O-O B-D 0-O e---e

Prize

100

90 t

f

80

-

:: E w k

70

-

60

-

2

50

-

g b

40

-

2:

30

-

g 0.

20

-

6

IO t MIddIe

Old AGE

Fig. 2. Percentage

of mature

GROUP

responses

for the five contractual

ownership

attributes.

group. For the contractual attributes the criterion was at least four out of five attributes. Any one child might be mature in all subgroups (highest level), or in none (lowest level), or in some combination of subgroups (intermediate levels). Two intermediate levels were identified: (a) Egocentri-ConCrete transitional level: mature in the egocentric subgroup, but not in the concrete or abstract subgroup; and (b) Concrete level: mature in both egocentric and concrete subgroups, but not in the abstract subgroup. In addition, there were 17 children who did not fall into any of the above four levels. They were lumped together under an ‘others’ category. A two-way classification table was formed comprising age (youngest, middle, oldest) and levels (i.e. highest, concrete, egocentric-concrete transitional, lowest, other). (The data have been collapsed across gender as no significant main or interaction effects involving this factor were found when it was included in a previous analysis.) This table was analysed using a log linear model of chi square. The analysis revealed a significant main effect for levels (x2 = 110.3, df= 4, p -c 0.001) and a significant age X level interaction (x2 = 108.2, df= 8, p < 0.001). The

F. Cram, S. H. Ng / Ownership attributes Highest level concrete level Egocentric/Concrete Lowest level Other

0-O o-o M-M O--O e---e

AGE

Fig. 3. Percentage

of children

73

Transitional

GROUP

at each level of conceptual

maturity.

interaction is shown in fig. 3. For the youngest group, 80% of the children were at the intermediate levels (egocentric/concrete and concrete levels). Sixty-three percent of children in the middle group were at the highest level, and this figure rose to 86% in the oldest group. Considering the levels, it can be seen from fig. 3 that the highest level increased across the age groups whereas the intermediate and the lowest levels decreased sharply from the youngest to the middle group. ‘Others’ fluctuated across the age groups with five in the youngest group, nine in the middle group, and three in the oldest group.

Discussion

The matrix of agreements between attributes, as indicated by the Mantel test, justified the categorization of the attributes into their pre-determined subgroups representing the various levels. The results based on individual attributes showed that greater age was associated with an increase in the endorsement of higher-level (i.e. contractual) attributes and in the rejection of lower-level (i.e. physical) attributes.

This was consistent

with the hypothesis;

significant

occurred

increase

yet it should be noted that no

for the egocentric

attributes

and for the

usage attribute, even though the trend was in the hypothesized direction. Most children, including the youngest ones, rejected the egocentric

(lowest

level)

attributes,

indicating

their awareness

of the dis-

tinction between personal desires and ownership. Children younger than those in the present study would need to be interviewed to establish whether, and at what age, egocentric ownership attributes are endorsed during earlier stages of development. On the other hand, older children need to be studied to establish the age at which the usage attribute is correctly understood. For reasons yet unclear, our oldest group had the most difficulty with this particular attribute. Rejection of the physical attributes was already clearly evident in the middle group, and was nearly universal in the oldest group. This progression may reflect experiential differences between the age groups. As children grow they will find and use objects that others have mislaid and also experience the misappropriation of their own possessions by siblings and/or peers (Shantz 1987). They will therefore become more able to recognize the transitory nature of possession based on physical attributes. Personal experience may also account for the high endorsement of the purchased attribute by subjects even in the youngest group. By the age of 4-6 years most children have had some experience of shop transactions (Stacey 1982) whereas there is less likelihood that these children would have personal experience of the other contractual attributes. A closer examination of the Mantel test shows that the purchased attribute has a low proportion of agreement with the other contractual attributes, suggesting that this attribute does not truly belong in the contractual subgroup. * This may be due to its early acceptance compared to the remaining contractual attributes. Using a multiple-attribute approach to examine awareness of private property ownership, this study has shown age-related changes across attributes as well as within an attribute. It has also provided multiple indicators of each of three primary conceptual levels, and yielded information for acertaining a child’s conceptual level. It was found that the youngest group was at the egocentric/concrete and concrete levels, ’ When the purchased attribute was taken out from conceptual level results remain essentially the same.

the Mantel

test. G = 2.59, p < 0.017. The

F. Cram, S.H. Ng / Ownership attributes

75

the middle group was largely at the highest level, and the oldest group was decisively at the highest (contractual) level. The Mantel test supported the a priori categorization of attributes into egocentric, physical, and contractual subgroups. With the exception of the purchased attribute, the remaining ten attributes should prove useful for future research.

References Beaglehole, E., 1931. Property: A study in social psychology. London: George Allen and Unwin. Berti, A.E., A.S. Bombi and A. Lis, 1982. The child’s conceptions about means of production and their owners. European Journal of Social Psychology 12, 221-239. Burris, V., 1982. The child’s conceptions of economic relations: A study of cognitive socialization. Sociological Focus 15, 307-325. Cummings, S. and D. Taebal, 1978. The economic socialization of children: A neo-Marxist analysis. Social Problems 26, 198-209. Furby, L., 1978. ‘Possessions: Toward a theory of their meaning and function throughout the life cycle’. In: P.B. Baltes (ed.), Life-span development and behatiour, Vol. 1. London: Academic Press. pp. 297-336. Furby, L., 1980. The origins and early development of possessive behaviour. Political Psychology (Spring), 30-42. Jhaveri, N., 1986. Children’s ideas about conceptions of profit, private property and economic inequality. Masters thesis, Psychology Dept., University of Otago. Knoke. D. and P.J. Burke, 1985. Log-linear models. Beverley Hills, CA: Sage. Leahy, R.L., 1983. Development of the conception of economic inequality: II. Explanations, justifications, and concepts of social mobility and change. Developmental Psychology 19, 111-125. Manly, B.F.J., 1986. Multivariate statistical methods: A primer. London: Chapman and Hall. Miller, G.A. and P.N. Johnson-Laud, 1976. Language and perception. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Moessinger, P., 1975. Developmental study of fair division and property. European Journal of Social Psychology 5, 385-394. Newman, D., 1978. ‘Ownership and permission among nursery school children’. In: J. Glick and K.A. Clarke-Stewart (eds.), The development of social understanding. New York: Wiley. pp. 213-249. Shantz, CU., 1987. Conflicts between children. Child Development 58, 283-305. Stacey, B.G., 1982. Economic socialization in the pre-adult years. British Journal of Social Psychology 21, 159-173.