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Ownership as a social status
Charles W Kalish1, Craig D Anderson
1University of Wisconsin, Madison, USA. cwkalish@wisc.edu
New Directions for Child and Adolescent Development
|June 15, 2011
Summary
Ownership is a key concept for understanding social status and development. Children can alter ownership, unlike other social norms, highlighting its individual nature.
Area of Science:
- Social Psychology
- Developmental Psychology
- Sociology
Background:
- Social constructions shape our understanding of status and societal norms.
- Ownership is a fundamental social fact with developmental implications.
- Understanding how individuals, including children, perceive and alter social facts is crucial.
Purpose of the Study:
- To explore ownership as a critical entry point for understanding social constructions and status.
- To examine the developmental features of ownership that make it a unique case study.
- To investigate how ownership differs from other social facts in terms of individual alterability.
Main Methods:
- Conceptual analysis of ownership as a social construct.
- Developmental psychology framework to analyze children's understanding of ownership.
- Comparative analysis of ownership versus other social facts (e.g., word meanings, social norms).
Main Results:
- Ownership serves as a valuable 'laboratory' for studying social status.
- Ownership is a consequential social fact that individuals, even children, can actively change.
- Children's experience with changing ownership differs from their experience with changing other social facts.
- Ownership is an individual property, distinguishing identical objects based on possession.
Conclusions:
- Ownership provides unique insights into the development of social cognition and status understanding.
- The individual and alterable nature of ownership makes it a distinct and important social phenomenon for developmental study.
- Further research into ownership can illuminate broader mechanisms of social construction and status attainment.
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