things about our species is our capacity
to create very diverse cultures but all
cultures are based on certain
fundamental principles which are shared
and one of those fundamental principles
is the principle of ownership ownership
controls just about every aspect of our
daily lives the property that we can
call ours the stuff we can do with it
give it away sell it where we can go and
where we can’t go ownership is really at
the core of who we are without any sense
of ownership we’d laid chaotic lives it
would be unstructured and that’s why
it’s at the heart of our legal systems
and the norms of social behavior that
must have a sub ID by and when you
ignore the rules of ownership then in
many instances you’re being antisocial
and possibly even criminal but as I’m
going to show you the concept or the
issue of ownership is really quite
elusive and I want to demonstrate this
with this this example in 2007 the
katawaga police in the North Carolina
received a telephone call from this
individual Shadow Wishard now Shannon
was a trader he went round buying up
goods and then selling them one for
profit and on this particular occasion
he was at an auction being held by a
storage company that were selling the
contents of lock ups and he spotted this
item which was a meat grilled smoker
barbecue so they bought it for a couple
of dollars but when he opened it up he
soon discovered that he was the owner
for more than he had bargained for
because he made a grisly discovery
because inside was a left human foot now
he didn’t know where it was he didn’t
know where it came from he didn’t know
if it was a corpse or or maybe an
unreported mirror so he he phoned the
police and in his very strong hillbilly
Appalachian acts and he said I got
myself a layer of human foot it’s plural
ugly has gotten grossed out so the
police turned up and they took the foot
away to begin their investigations now
meanwhile the rest of the news got out
that he had discovered this incredible
find
and Shannon being one who’s not shy
publicity realized that maybe this is a
business opportunity so he called the
police back he said
I bought that I want to I want keep my
foot okay and he was gonna put on
display and charge three dollars for the
adults and one dollar for the kids to
take a look at his foot meanwhile the
police had done their investigations
discovered that the foot had not come
from a course but came from this
individual John Wood who lived in South
Carolina now three years earlier John
had been in a small airplane crash which
unfortunately killed his father who was
piloting the plane and he of course
himself was very severely injured which
is why I end up in hospital having to
have his his foot amputated but he was
also at the time in the grips of a very
deep addiction to drugs and alcohol and
in this out of mind he thought I want to
keep my foot as a memorial to my father
so he asked the hospital can I have my
foot back and remarkably they said yeah
okay and they sent the foot back to me
whereupon he set about trying to
preserve he stuck in the meat tray and
covered it with embalming fluid and then
he had the bright idea of putting in a
tree in his garden to have it dried in
the North Carolina Sun meanwhile his
life was spiraling out of control and so
he lost his home and all his possessions
including the smoker grill and his foot
ended up in the storage unit and that’s
how I ended up in the possession of
Shannon so when he got a phone call from
the police to come and reclaim his foot
he headed up to made in the town where
this all unfolded and he was confronted
by Shannon in the car park he tried to
persuade him to agree to joint custody
of the foot because the the media were
getting so excited about this this is
this was ludicrous and and he wanted to
put it on show and go on tour and of
course you know they just saw this was
the craziest thing possible they said
I’ve ever went to court in law
Shannon wouldn’t have a leg to stand on
well it did actually end up in the core
law ended up in a national television
syndicated reality show and the judge
ruled that the foot belonged to John
wood and should be returned to him but
they also recognized that Shannon
actually had a legitimate claim because
he had purchased the cooker so he was
compensated to the tune of $5,000 now
this amazing story is told in a
fantastic documentary called Finders
Keepers I highly recommend it but there
I like this story apart from the very
colorful characters is it illustrates
that even something so personable as
your body parts can be contested in the
court of law
you might think you own your body but
you don’t actually because you can’t do
with it as you wish if you could you’d
be able to say for example sell a kidney
but that is illegal in the UK and it’s
illegal in the US but you can sell your
kidney in Singapore or Australia so that
goes to show that unlike John woods foot
ownership is not cotton dried it has to
be negotiated now the reason that’s the
case is because ownership is a concept
and this is a really important issue
which was identified by another
individual who by coincidence is
cut-and-dried Jeremy Bentham this is a
mummified corpse of Jeremy Bentham which
sits in the cabinet in University
College London now here’s a moral floss
for interested in law and society and he
pointed out look there’s nothing in made
sure to tell you who owns anything you
have to kind of figure it out and he
said it’s it’s it’s not a material
property it’s a metaphysical property
it’s a mere conception of the mind now
this is a reason I’m interested in
ownership because I study cognitive
development concepts how do children
acquire concepts do we teach them or do
they learn them through some intuitive
mechanisms and the other reason I’m
interested in ownership is that we are
quite unique in the in the animal world
because we acquire stuff lots of stuff
lots of possessions things that we don’t
even necessarily need and the reason we
do this is because many ways what we
have is an extension of who we are a
point that was made by William James and
what James said in this famous quote is
that a man’s self is really a
combination of everything he can claim
ownership of his family is wife and so
on but also his property’s reputation so
when do we begin this obsession with
owning things how does this start well
it starts early children claim ownership
over their childhood toys their teddy
bears and their blankets in the first
year but by the time they get to the
first birthday they’re starting to look
around to see what else they can claim
ownership over they’re starting to use
the words like mine and yours and
they’re fighting with our sibling
everything but those little battles in
the household are nothing compared to
the all-out war which takes place in the
nursery 80% of fights and disputes in
the nursery are over toys and that’s not
just any toy it’s the toys that the
other kids would it’s not uncommon for a
child to put down their own toy and then
go and try and snatch an identical toy
from another child and that’s because
they realize that possessions and
ownership are all part of our status now
they can’t go around snatching
everything they have to learn that
they’ve got to abide by the rules and
some of the early rules they understand
are finders keepers if you have in your
possession you own it and that’s
actually something shared with many
animals in the natural world but there
are other rules of ownership that they
have to learn for example the
philosopher John Locke talked about the
effort that goes into acquiring a piece
or possession or the effort or labor in
doing so you see for us if we go out
into the woods and cut down a tree in
John Locke’s odd notion you they know in
that tree because you put the effort in
acquiring it so when do children start
to understand this well this was a
question that I investigate with my
former graduate student Patricia can
geyser and what she did in her studies
was that she had three-year-olds sitting
next to the experimenter herself in this
case with a pile of clay well either the
clay was in front of one person or was
communal and then they made these these
toys and then they asked the children
well who owns the toy
well the three-year-olds reasoned that
it didn’t matter where the clay came
from didn’t matter if you took someone
else’s clay if you made the object it
was your object but the adults of course
realized that you have to keep track of
the source material but a three-year-old
would reckon that for example if you
went into your neighbor’s garden this
model of their garden shed then brought
it over to your guard and built it up
again you would be the owner we recall
the police of course now you might think
well adults are much more sensitive and
they’re much more sensible of
arbitrating between who owns things but
actually it turns out that these are
constantly turning up with the courts of
all about who owns anything take for
example this example this is a mural
appeared on a brick a concrete brick
wall on a building site in Detroit 2011
it is of course a bag see if you might
recognize it I remember when all this
was trees now when word got out that
there was a Banksy in a local demolition
site the local gallery went down and
they removed it because they reckoned
that maybe the builders wouldn’t
understand that this was a work of art
they just demolished the wall thinking
it was just graffiti but when the
builders site when the site owners
learned that they’d done this they sued
the art gallery so who owned it well
clearly Banksy had put the effort into
making it but he never turns up to claim
ownership over his works of art what
about this sites owners they had the
source material but then of course they
are going put the effort in to preserve
this for posterity
well at the end of the day the court
ruled in favor of the Art Gallery and
they got the possession of the ownership
of the Banksy for two and a half
thousand dollars which was a good
investment four years later they sold it
for a hundred and thirty seven thousand
dollars so ownership and putting effort
into things is how you can make a
legitimate claim but actually it turns
out we value things that we involve our
efforts and this is known as the the
IKEA effect of the Swedish store that
make you where you build your own
furnishings it turns out that if you
make something you think it’s a lot
better than an identical object made by
somebody else even though it’s the same
object and we’ve just finished a series
of studies looking at this and it turns
all the children to five to six years of
age also think that if you make
something you put effort into it then
it’s better than something else made by
another person this principle actually
good dates back a bit earlier it turns
out that marketeers
and people in advertising have known
this for a while any Bernays arguably
one of the fathers of marketing and
advertising was interested in
psychological principles to increase the
sales and goods so for example in the
1950s he was employed by the Betty
Crocker cake company to increase the
sales of their cake mixes and you know
what he advised them to do he told them
to stay at the instruction to add two
eggs that simple instruction changed the
perception of the value of the cake the
desirability of the cake the recipe
didn’t mean eggs it’s just the act of
investing you’re a late laborer an
effort made
difference but it turns out you don’t
necessarily have to put effort into
increasing the value of your own
possessions simply having in your
possession you think it’s better a more
more valuable than something else this
is a point that was made by Richard
Thaler the economist back in 1980 he
gave his Sicard his Chicago students
either a coffee cup or he gave them a
chocolate bar and he said would you like
to swap for the other item and
irrespective of whatever item may have
been endowed with they prefer to keep
what they’d been given this is the
so-called endowment effect and it’s one
of the most robust phenomena and
behavioral economics we tend not to want
to give up what we already have in our
possession now why is that well there’s
a number of explanations but this one by
Danny Kahneman when the few
psychologists ever to win the Nobel
Prize has been very successful
explanation the he argues this is called
prospect theory the prospect of a loss
weighs more greatly in your mind than
the prospect of the game which is why
the asking price when you’re selling
something is always much higher than
what people are prepared to pay now this
may well be true but it does have
limited application because the
endowment effect is not found in peoples
such as hunter-gatherers is these are
the has they tried from Tanzania they
don’t show an endowment effect unless
they’ve had experience of trading with
Westerners more interestingly it turns
out the endowment effect is also much
less in people from the Far East
and one of the reasons might be is
because they live in a society which is
much more collectivist much more
integrated in comparison to Western
society which is much more individualist
that can status driven however if you
take people from the Far East and get
them to think about themselves or talk
about themselves suddenly the endowment
effect appears so we thought well this
is interesting maybe this is a mechanism
so again in our studies in Bristol we
undertook research into the endowment
effect and this is a work I just
published with my my graduate student
Sandra from Norway
as you can see Sandra’s admittedly happy
to be working in my lab and what we did
is because normally the endowment effect
doesn’t appear in children till around
about five to six years
age by quizzes the same age as the IKEA
effect but she took three-year-olds
again and got them to do this task so
first of all she presented them with a
bunch of toys and she asked them to rate
them on this scale of preference how
much they liked them now if they were
given two identical toys and they placed
them on the same spot well that
indicated they understood the principle
of equivalence these two things are of
equal value she then gave them one of
the toys which was a spinning top in
this case and then kept one of the toys
for herself the child put their toy in
their box with their name and the
experimenter put the toy in their books
where her were her name with her name
that’s it now the critical manipulation
one group of the children were asked to
think about themselves whilst they made
a picture of themselves
another group of children make a picture
of her friend and talked about their
friend and the third group were asked to
just make a foreign scene she then asked
them to reevaluate the toys afterwards
in only the group had been asked to
think about themselves they showed an
increase in the value of their own
object the endowment effect so in other
words there’s an integral relationship
between our perceptions of our self and
the stuff that we own and value but this
is changing because I think the world is
changing the rampant consumerism and
materialism which has been driven in the
past century is starting to look very
awkward when we recognize that the
planet has limited resources previously
we would aspire to status symbols
typically the sports car everyone would
aspire to have this but we’re beginning
to understand that this is unsustainable
and that’s why we are seeing this
emergence of a new attitude towards
consumerism and materialism you don’t
actually have to own your car anymore
companies such as uber I’ve done very
well all this and then there are
companies where you don’t actually have
to own the holiday property air B&B
rather people are shifting their
perceptions of ownership towards
experiences and for many Millennials the
notion of ever owning your house is
increasingly looking more distant rather
people would like to have experiences
attached themselves to those experiences
claim ownership over those experiences
and I think that’s best illustrated by
this bizarre phenomenon that we’ve
all observed in the past couple of years
the rise of the selfie now with the
elections coming up next to me I just
had to put this photograph in of Hillary
Clinton ten years ago when you wanted to
code you know take a picture of Hillary
Clinton
you’d be pointing the camera at her but
look what happened very recently now
although is looking at her they’re
taking a picture of themselves in in
relation to Hillary Clinton
it’s as if they want to document their
experience so they can seek validation
and put up on Facebook or wherever it is
and it’s not just people of low status
or loose self-esteem we’re doing this
nobody is immune to it even very famous
people are engaged in the whole selfie
phenomenon and actually when it comes
down to famous professors of psychology
there are some of us who would like to
look back and reflect the glory of
others thank you [Applause]