Pascal Boyer presents a masterly survey of what is known about human ownership psychology, drawing on a diverse literature in the life and human sciences, spanning from biology, psychology, and anthropology to jurisprudence and philosophy. He achieves a felicitous integration of this welter of information by casting human ownership intuitions as the joint product of constraints from our competitive resource acquisition propensities interacting with our distinctive human sociality, yielding our intuitions of legitimate ownership as its outcome. By generating ownership intuitions/judgements at the interface of these independent functional domains, rather than from a specialized set of principles dedicated to ownership, his model effortlessly incorporates a variety of contextual and cultural variables in accounting for a wide range of human ownership intuitions/judgements, including non-obvious and subtle ones. This marks a major advance in our understanding of human ownership psychology on which Boyer is to be congratulated.
Given the many significant roles that ownership, property relations, and proprietary attitudes play in human affairs, this is no small matter. With potential implications for and applications to issues ranging from our self-understanding to the institutional arrangements under which we live, Boyer's model merits close attention and scrutiny. Here I would like to highlight the utility of distinguishing between intuitions and judgements of legitimate ownership on the one hand, and the personal sense of proprietary possession or owning, that is, the subjective sense of owning something (henceforth “sense of ownership”), on the other.
As Boyer shows, the former are generated at the interface between resource acquisition and cooperative sociality. Our sense of ownership itself and as such, however, is already part of our resource acquisition capacity, where at a minimum it figures in the form of our sense of ownership of our bodies as the central invariant of resource acquisition (try taking someone's fingers away!). From there the sense of ownership extends out, on a species-specific basis, to various extra-corporeal objects and circumstances in which a sense of ownership may be invested. This extra-corporeal sphere is particularly capacious in humans, as Boyer notes, but it occurs with narrower compass in animals as well (territories, nests, burrows; Strassmann & Queller, Reference Strassmann and Queller2014).
Among these extra-corporeal targets of a sense of ownership, animal territoriality occupies a conspicuous position. Territorial animals, whether social or solitary, behave in every respect as if they were the owners of the territory they defend. They patrol its borders, engage intruders agonistically, and some species mark territory with urine or special scent glands. Territorial defense has been a significant focus of modeling and controversy in biology (Gintis, Reference Gintis2007; Grafen, Reference Grafen1987; Kokko, López-Sepulcre, & Morrell, Reference Kokko, López-Sepulcre and Morrell2006; Krier, Reference Krier2009; Maynard Smith, Reference Maynard Smith1982). The issues in this controversy can be integrated, I suggest, into a biological account of a sense of ownership general enough to include the expansible human one by recognizing the role of resource investment in rendering extra-corporeal targets subject to a sense of ownership.
The exigencies of survival and reproduction dictate that an animal's decisions regarding territorial defense should maximize future payoffs of its current investment, rather than be based on how much of such efforts it has expended in the past (“sunk cost fallacy”, for which see Gintis, Reference Gintis2007, and references therein). However, as noted by Alan Grafen in his critique of John Maynard Smith's bid to account for the advantage conferred by “prior possession” on territory holders (Maynard Smith, Reference Maynard Smith1982), future payoffs are contingent on circumstances beyond the bounds of a given territory and its owner's informational horizons. They include factors like the over-all density of high-quality territories, the cost of search for a new territory, and the distribution of strategies adopted by other members of the population (Grafen, Reference Grafen1987).
How does an animal, anchored to its territory by the need to defend it, take these extra-territorial circumstances bearing on its defensive efforts into account? Given the opacity of the future, and the animal's limited informational horizons, the principal proxy of the needed information can only be the animal's own past experience – specifically the frequency and strength of past intrusions, its own history of success in fending them off (sustained by the resources of its territory), and the like. An animal would accordingly do well to keep a cumulative running record of the outcome history of its investment of effort in defense of its territory, presumably stored as implicit memory in its prefrontal–basal ganglia system through procedural learning. Assume, in keeping with the above, that the time integral of that record constitutes the animal's sense of territorial ownership.
The same logic is readily extended to the investment of effort in other extra-corporeal objects of potential future benefit such as nests, burrows, and even movable assets. The latter are rare in the animal kingdom (see Strassmann & Queller, Reference Strassmann and Queller2014), but the investment logic would apply with particular force to a toolmaker. The extent to which fashioning a tool requires time, effort, and skill is the extent to which it pays to keep that tool for repeated use in the future, and to defend its possession. The twigs used by chimpanzees to fish termites, or the unworked bashing stones they use to crack nuts hardly qualify in this regard, while the skilled labor needed to fashion a stone tool does.
Ancestral Homo accordingly can be assumed to have evolved a motivational propensity to keep and defend the tools it fashioned and, by extension – as cerebral capacity expanded in our ancestry – anything else of prospective utility into which we invest labor and deliberate effort, summarized in a tacit sense of ownership. The contrasting bearing of “invested effort” on ownership in humans and great apes is tellingly illustrated by a comparative experimental study cited by Boyer (Kanngiesser, Rossano, Frickel, Tomm, & Tomasello, Reference Kanngiesser, Rossano, Frickel, Tomm and Tomasello2020; see also Rochat et al., Reference Rochat, Robbins, Passos-Ferreira, Oliva, Dias and Guo2014).
I suggest, in other words, that that into which we invest our deliberate efforts, whether in the form of labor, resources, thought, commitment, or care, comes to matter to us in a proprietary sense, and as such supplies the ultimate foundation for the uniquely open-ended human sense of proprietary ownership. It comes to us as part of our resource acquisition capacity itself, ready to be shaped and channeled into intuitions of legitimate ownership in interaction with our social-cooperative propensities, in good agreement with Boyer's model.
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Pascal Boyer presents a masterly survey of what is known about human ownership psychology, drawing on a diverse literature in the life and human sciences, spanning from biology, psychology, and anthropology to jurisprudence and philosophy. He achieves a felicitous integration of this welter of information by casting human ownership intuitions as the joint product of constraints from our competitive resource acquisition propensities interacting with our distinctive human sociality, yielding our intuitions of legitimate ownership as its outcome. By generating ownership intuitions/judgements at the interface of these independent functional domains, rather than from a specialized set of principles dedicated to ownership, his model effortlessly incorporates a variety of contextual and cultural variables in accounting for a wide range of human ownership intuitions/judgements, including non-obvious and subtle ones. This marks a major advance in our understanding of human ownership psychology on which Boyer is to be congratulated.
Given the many significant roles that ownership, property relations, and proprietary attitudes play in human affairs, this is no small matter. With potential implications for and applications to issues ranging from our self-understanding to the institutional arrangements under which we live, Boyer's model merits close attention and scrutiny. Here I would like to highlight the utility of distinguishing between intuitions and judgements of legitimate ownership on the one hand, and the personal sense of proprietary possession or owning, that is, the subjective sense of owning something (henceforth “sense of ownership”), on the other.
As Boyer shows, the former are generated at the interface between resource acquisition and cooperative sociality. Our sense of ownership itself and as such, however, is already part of our resource acquisition capacity, where at a minimum it figures in the form of our sense of ownership of our bodies as the central invariant of resource acquisition (try taking someone's fingers away!). From there the sense of ownership extends out, on a species-specific basis, to various extra-corporeal objects and circumstances in which a sense of ownership may be invested. This extra-corporeal sphere is particularly capacious in humans, as Boyer notes, but it occurs with narrower compass in animals as well (territories, nests, burrows; Strassmann & Queller, Reference Strassmann and Queller2014).
Among these extra-corporeal targets of a sense of ownership, animal territoriality occupies a conspicuous position. Territorial animals, whether social or solitary, behave in every respect as if they were the owners of the territory they defend. They patrol its borders, engage intruders agonistically, and some species mark territory with urine or special scent glands. Territorial defense has been a significant focus of modeling and controversy in biology (Gintis, Reference Gintis2007; Grafen, Reference Grafen1987; Kokko, López-Sepulcre, & Morrell, Reference Kokko, López-Sepulcre and Morrell2006; Krier, Reference Krier2009; Maynard Smith, Reference Maynard Smith1982). The issues in this controversy can be integrated, I suggest, into a biological account of a sense of ownership general enough to include the expansible human one by recognizing the role of resource investment in rendering extra-corporeal targets subject to a sense of ownership.
The exigencies of survival and reproduction dictate that an animal's decisions regarding territorial defense should maximize future payoffs of its current investment, rather than be based on how much of such efforts it has expended in the past (“sunk cost fallacy”, for which see Gintis, Reference Gintis2007, and references therein). However, as noted by Alan Grafen in his critique of John Maynard Smith's bid to account for the advantage conferred by “prior possession” on territory holders (Maynard Smith, Reference Maynard Smith1982), future payoffs are contingent on circumstances beyond the bounds of a given territory and its owner's informational horizons. They include factors like the over-all density of high-quality territories, the cost of search for a new territory, and the distribution of strategies adopted by other members of the population (Grafen, Reference Grafen1987).
How does an animal, anchored to its territory by the need to defend it, take these extra-territorial circumstances bearing on its defensive efforts into account? Given the opacity of the future, and the animal's limited informational horizons, the principal proxy of the needed information can only be the animal's own past experience – specifically the frequency and strength of past intrusions, its own history of success in fending them off (sustained by the resources of its territory), and the like. An animal would accordingly do well to keep a cumulative running record of the outcome history of its investment of effort in defense of its territory, presumably stored as implicit memory in its prefrontal–basal ganglia system through procedural learning. Assume, in keeping with the above, that the time integral of that record constitutes the animal's sense of territorial ownership.
The same logic is readily extended to the investment of effort in other extra-corporeal objects of potential future benefit such as nests, burrows, and even movable assets. The latter are rare in the animal kingdom (see Strassmann & Queller, Reference Strassmann and Queller2014), but the investment logic would apply with particular force to a toolmaker. The extent to which fashioning a tool requires time, effort, and skill is the extent to which it pays to keep that tool for repeated use in the future, and to defend its possession. The twigs used by chimpanzees to fish termites, or the unworked bashing stones they use to crack nuts hardly qualify in this regard, while the skilled labor needed to fashion a stone tool does.
Ancestral Homo accordingly can be assumed to have evolved a motivational propensity to keep and defend the tools it fashioned and, by extension – as cerebral capacity expanded in our ancestry – anything else of prospective utility into which we invest labor and deliberate effort, summarized in a tacit sense of ownership. The contrasting bearing of “invested effort” on ownership in humans and great apes is tellingly illustrated by a comparative experimental study cited by Boyer (Kanngiesser, Rossano, Frickel, Tomm, & Tomasello, Reference Kanngiesser, Rossano, Frickel, Tomm and Tomasello2020; see also Rochat et al., Reference Rochat, Robbins, Passos-Ferreira, Oliva, Dias and Guo2014).
I suggest, in other words, that that into which we invest our deliberate efforts, whether in the form of labor, resources, thought, commitment, or care, comes to matter to us in a proprietary sense, and as such supplies the ultimate foundation for the uniquely open-ended human sense of proprietary ownership. It comes to us as part of our resource acquisition capacity itself, ready to be shaped and channeled into intuitions of legitimate ownership in interaction with our social-cooperative propensities, in good agreement with Boyer's model.
Acknowledgement
I am indebted to Eugene Sachs for alerting me to the significance of the psychology of investment in human affairs.
Financial support
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.
Competing interest
None.