People Have Systematically Different Ownership Intuitions in Seemingly Simple Cases

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, parametrically varied events. We found that people ( N = 120 U.S. adults) had similar intuitions about ownership for some events but sharply opposing intuitions for others (Experiment 1). People ( N = 120 U.S. adults) were unaware of these conflicts and overestimated ownership consensus (Experiment 2). Moreover, differences in people’s ownership intuitions predicted their intuitions about the acceptability of using, altering, controlling, and destroying the owned object ( N = 130 U.S. adults; Experiment 3), even when ownership was not explicitly mentioned ( N = 130 U.S. adults; Experiment 4). Subject-level analyses suggest that these disagreements reflect at least two underlying intuitive theories, one in which intentions are central to ownership and another in which physical possession is prioritized.