Is Mind-Reading Involved in Ownership Judgments?

How do people determine who owns what? While existing research has identified a number of psychological and behavioral sources of ownership judgments, the role of mental state attribution has received less attention. We conducted three online experiments (N = 1246) examining if ownership judgments rely on mind-reading: the capacity to infer others’ intentions, beliefs, and knowledge states. Using vignettes, we tested if ownership judgments are sensitive to variations in contextual cues (Study 1), beliefs about the permissibility of taking items (Study 2), and knowledge about social norms (Study 3). We also tested if the moral aspects of a scenario affect judgments of rightful ownership transfer. Our findings indicate that ownership judgments indeed vary in response to these factors, and that they do not vary on par with moral judgments. These findings are best explained in terms of mind-reading and support the argument that ownership is fundamentally a social phenomenon: not a relationship between people and resources but rather between people about resources.