Attributing ownership to hold others accountable

Ownership is often viewed as demarcating who can use resources and who is restricted from using them. This paper explores another side of ownership-ownership may be attributed to mark individuals as accountable and responsible for causing harm. Across eight experiments, participants (total N = 2517) read vignettes where an agent's actions led resources to be deposited on others' land (Experiments 1-5) or on unowned land (Experiments 6-8). The resources benefitted, harmed, or had no effect on the landowners, or on plants and animals on the land. This manipulation caused an asymmetry between harms and benefits in ownership judgments. Participants more strongly endorsed the agent as owner for harmful resources than beneficial ones, and they also judged it more acceptable for the agent to retrieve harmful resources from others' land. In contrast, participants more strongly endorsed resources as belonging to landowners or to no one when they were beneficial rather than harmful. We also found that participants endorsed the agent as owning harmful resources even when other means were available for conveying the agent was accountable. Together, our findings show that ownership serves functions besides rewarding individuals with rights over property and besides ensuring individuals are responsible for harm caused by their property-people also attribute ownership to ensure that wrongdoers remain connected and accountable for harm they cause. We discuss implications for theories of ownership, and how our findings relate to other asymmetries between harms and benefits.