Ownership is at the heart of people's daily activities and has been throughout history. People
consider ownership when acting on objects, engaging in financial matters, and assessing …

Humans are lawmakers like we are toolmakers. Why do humans make so many laws? Here
we examine the structure of laws to look for clues about how humans use them in …

Legal systems often rule that people own objects in their territory. We propose that an early-
developing ability to make territory-based inferences of ownership helps children address …

Across four preregistered experiments on American adults (total N= 968), and five
supplemental experiments (total N= 869), we examined four accounts that might explain …

Owners decide what happens to their property, and so adults typically view autonomous
beings as non-owned. If children likewise consider autonomy when judging what is owned …

We suggest that the psychology of ownership encompasses much more than feelings of
ownership and includes much of “legal” ownership. To make our case, we review ownership …

First possession is a common heuristic people use to solve property conflicts. Previous
studies examined whether young children judged ownership based on the first possession …

Theories of morality have largely tried to explain the brighter side of behavior, answering
questions about why people behave in ways that are kind, generous, and good. Our …

Our understanding of ownership influences how we interact with objects and with each
other. Here, we studied people's intuitions about ownership transfer using a set of simple …

The legal principle of accession suggests that people sometimes extend ownership of a
prominent item to related objects, resources, and benefits. For example, people might …