Institute of Social Psychology, School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Xi'an Jiaotong University, Xi'an, China.
CAS Key Laboratory of Behavioral Sciences, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China.
PLoS One. 2021 Dec 2;16(12):e0260335. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0260335. eCollection 2021.
First possession is a common heuristic people use to solve property conflicts. Previous studies examined whether young children judged ownership based on the first possession heuristic and its stability when conflicting with other cues such as labor, but few focused on the effects in the discovery context. In this study, we used two discovery stories which indicate the discovered object was not owned by anyone beforehand and investigated ownership reasoning with the first possession heuristic in Chinese 3- to 6-year-old preschoolers. By pitting the first possession cue against the labor cue, we investigated the stability of the first possession heuristic in young children's ownership reasoning. The results showed that in the condition where there was only the first possession cue, both the younger and older groups used the first possession heuristic to reason about ownership. However, in the labor condition, 5- and 6-year-olds ceased to support the first possessor and turned to assign objects to the laborer, whereas 3-year-old children still insisted on the first possession heuristic (Study 1 and Study 2). Children across four age groups did not assign ownership to the person who just played with the object but did not modify it (Study 2). The results demonstrate that Chinese preschoolers understand the role of first possession in ownership assignment at an early age in the discovery context but the elderly preschoolers do not rely on the first possession cue when there are conflicting cues such as labor.
第一占有是人们解决财产冲突常用的启发式策略。先前的研究检验了幼儿是否根据第一占有启发式来判断所有权，以及当与其他线索（如劳动）冲突时，该启发式的稳定性如何，但很少有研究关注发现情境中的影响。在这项研究中，我们使用了两个发现故事，这些故事表明之前没有人拥有被发现的物体，并调查了 3 至 6 岁学龄前儿童在发现情境中使用第一占有启发式进行所有权推理的情况。通过将第一占有线索与劳动线索进行对比，我们研究了幼儿所有权推理中第一占有启发式的稳定性。结果表明，在只有第一占有线索的情况下，年幼组和年长组都使用第一占有启发式来推理所有权。然而，在劳动条件下，5 岁和 6 岁的儿童不再支持第一占有者，而是将物体分配给劳动者，而 3 岁的儿童仍然坚持第一占有启发式（研究 1 和研究 2）。四个年龄组的儿童都不会将所有权分配给刚刚玩过但未修改过物体的人（研究 2）。研究结果表明，中国学龄前儿童在发现情境中很早就理解了第一占有在所有权分配中的作用，但年长的学龄前儿童在存在冲突线索（如劳动）时不会依赖第一占有线索。
