Decision Consortium Seminar

Ori Friedman

Thursday, November 19, 2009, 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm
3048 EAST HALL
Sponsored By: Evolution & Human Adaptation Program & Decision Consortium

Event Information

Abstract: Appropriate behavior towards an object requires the ability to infer who owns it. There are two major contexts in which people make such inferences. In Discover contexts, people infer who owns an already-owned object (e.g., a ball with which several children are playing). In Decide contexts, people decide who has established ownership over an un-owned object (e.g., a seashell seen first by one child, but then grabbed by another). Drawing on experiments investigating preschoolers and adults, I provide evidence that although people are sensitive to first possession in both contexts, distinct principles guide ownership inferences in each case. In Discover contexts, first possession is used to reconstruct object history, and is used when it is informative about who possessed the object in the past. In Decide contexts, people judge who owns an object by considering who was necessary for the object to be (first) possessed. According to this account, inferences in Decide contexts depend on counterfactual reasoning or on processes akin to those used to make judgments about causality.

 

Background Readings:

 

Friedman & Neary (2008). Determining who owns what: Do children infer ownership from first possession? Cognition, 107, 829–849.

 

Stake (2004). The property ‘instinct.’ Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B, 359, 1763–1774.

For More Information

Email: mohrbach@umich.edu
Website URL: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~prestos/Consumption/