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Updated: Sep 28, 2025
08:01
Virtual Hand with Ambiguous Movement between the Self and Other Origin: Sense of Ownership and 'Other-Produced' Agency
Published on: October 28, 2020
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Attributing ownership to hold others accountable.
Emily Elizabeth Stonehouse1, Ori Friedman1
1University of Waterloo, Canada.
Cognition
|March 29, 2022
Summary
People attribute ownership not just for resource use but to assign accountability for harm. This study reveals ownership links wrongdoers to the harm they cause, ensuring responsibility.
Area of Science:
- Psychology
- Social Psychology
- Legal Psychology
Background:
- Traditional views of ownership focus on resource allocation and rights.
- Ownership also plays a role in assigning responsibility for actions and their consequences.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the role of ownership in attributing accountability for harm.
- To explore how judgments of ownership differ between beneficial and harmful resources.
Main Methods:
- Eight experiments with 2517 participants reading vignettes.
- Vignettes involved agents causing resources to be deposited on owned or unowned land.
- Resource effects (beneficial, harmful, neutral) on land and its inhabitants were manipulated.
Main Results:
- Participants attributed ownership more strongly to agents for harmful resources than beneficial ones.
- Ownership was more readily assigned to agents for harmful resources, even when accountability was otherwise clear.
- Conversely, beneficial resources were more likely to be attributed to landowners or no one.
Conclusions:
- Ownership serves to connect wrongdoers to the harm they cause, ensuring accountability.
- Findings highlight an asymmetry between harm and benefit in ownership judgments.
- This extends theories of ownership beyond resource rights and property-related responsibility.
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