{"title":"Is Mind-Reading Involved in Ownership Judgments?","authors":"Réka Blazsek, Christophe Heintz","doi":"10.1111/cogs.70097","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"<p>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 (<i>N</i> = 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.</p>","PeriodicalId":48349,"journal":{"name":"Cognitive Science","volume":"49 8","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":2.4000,"publicationDate":"2025-08-05","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/cogs.70097","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Cognitive Science","FirstCategoryId":"102","ListUrlMain":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/cogs.70097","RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"心理学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q2","JCRName":"PSYCHOLOGY, EXPERIMENTAL","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
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.
期刊介绍：
Cognitive Science publishes articles in all areas of cognitive science, covering such topics as knowledge representation, inference, memory processes, learning, problem solving, planning, perception, natural language understanding, connectionism, brain theory, motor control, intentional systems, and other areas of interdisciplinary concern. Highest priority is given to research reports that are specifically written for a multidisciplinary audience. The audience is primarily researchers in cognitive science and its associated fields, including anthropologists, education researchers, psychologists, philosophers, linguists, computer scientists, neuroscientists, and roboticists.
求助内容：
应助结果提醒方式：
京公网安备 11010802042870号
