Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Canada.
Department of Psychology, University of Toronto, Canada.
Cognition. 2020 Sep;202:104319. doi: 10.1016/j.cognition.2020.104319. Epub 2020 May 25.
One of the hallmarks of ownership is the right to control one's property. Living beings thus pose an interesting puzzle for ownership, since they have some capacity to decide what happens to themselves-they can direct their own motion, pursue their own goals, and make their own decisions. Recent work has shown that adults consider this autonomy to be the key factor in determining whether a human (or human-like) being can be owned. However, little is known about how children reason about the ownership of living beings. Across three experiments we show that children (ages 4-7) use principles of control and autonomy to reason about the ownership of familiar and novel animals. At all ages tested, children were more likely to say that a typically wild animal (e.g., a bear) was owned if a homeowner had controlled its movements by putting it in a cage, rather than simply standing near it in their yard (Experiment 1). Children also used this cue of control to predict whether novel animals were owned (Experiment 2)-and for these unfamiliar animals, the effect of control was even larger. Finally, Experiment 3 found that children's judgments were not specifically driven by the use of a cage to control the animal, but also extended to animals that inherently had the ability to escape (e.g., fly or jump). These autonomous animals were judged as non-owned, while those that could not escape were judged as owned. The use of these principles was evident at all ages, but became stronger with age, particularly when considering novel animals. These are the first studies, to our knowledge, to investigate the development of reasoning about the ownership of animals, and they suggest that, like adults, children consider autonomy an essential factor in the ownership of living things.
所有权的一个标志是对自己财产的控制权。生物因此构成了所有权的一个有趣谜题，因为它们有一定的能力决定自己的命运——它们可以指挥自己的行动，追求自己的目标，并做出自己的决定。最近的研究表明，成年人认为这种自主性是决定一个人（或类人）是否可以被拥有的关键因素。然而，对于儿童如何推理生物的所有权，我们知之甚少。在三项实验中，我们表明儿童（4-7 岁）会使用控制和自主性原则来推理熟悉和陌生动物的所有权。在所有测试的年龄组中，如果房主通过将动物关进笼子来控制其行动，而不是仅仅站在院子里靠近它，那么孩子们更有可能说一只通常是野生动物（例如，熊）是被拥有的（实验 1）。儿童还使用这种控制线索来预测陌生动物是否被拥有（实验 2）——对于这些不熟悉的动物，控制的效果甚至更大。最后，实验 3 发现，儿童的判断并不是由使用笼子来控制动物所驱动的，而是延伸到那些具有固有逃脱能力的动物（例如，会飞或会跳）。这些自主动物被判断为非拥有，而那些无法逃脱的动物则被判断为拥有。这些原则的使用在所有年龄段都很明显，但随着年龄的增长而增强，尤其是在考虑陌生动物时。这些是我们所知的第一批调查儿童对动物所有权推理发展的研究，它们表明，与成年人一样，儿童认为自主性是生物所有权的一个重要因素。
