RESUMO
Resumen O sentido de propriedade reflete o entendimento e o julgamento que as pessoas apresentam em relação à apropriação e ao uso dos recursos disponíveis. A partir de um enfoque evolucionista, os objetivos deste artigo foram realizar uma análise teórica sobre a ontogênese do sentido de propriedade buscando descrever os critérios utilizados pelas crianças para atribuírem a propriedade a alguém e lançar uma hipótese explicativa de haver alguma vantagem adaptativa para essa capacidade. Conclusões preliminares sugerem que crianças, em diferentes culturas, usam variados critérios para fazerem julgamentos e inferências sobre a posse e a propriedade e que o aparecimento precoce dessa capacidade desempenharia importante papel para as interações sociais, tais como o de minimizar conflitos originados pela disputa de recursos.
Abstract The sense of ownership reflects people's understanding and judgment regarding the appropriation and use of available resources. From an evolutionary approach, the aims of this paper were to conduct a theoretical analysis on the ontogenesis of the sense of property, seeking to describe the criteria used by children to assign property to someone and to put forward an explanatory hypothesis that there is an adaptive advantage in this capacity. Preliminary conclusions suggest that children, in different cultures, use varying criteria to make judgments and inferences about possess and ownership, and that the early emergence of this ability would play an important role in social interactions, such as minimizing conflicts arising from resource disputes.
RESUMO
To what extent do early intuitions about ownership depend on cultural and socio-economic circumstances? We investigated the question by testing reasoning about third party ownership conflicts in various groups of three- and five-year-old children (N=176), growing up in seven highly contrasted social, economic, and cultural circumstances (urban rich, poor, very poor, rural poor, and traditional) spanning three continents. Each child was presented with a series of scripts involving two identical dolls fighting over an object of possession. The child had to decide who of the two dolls should own the object. Each script enacted various potential reasons for attributing ownership: creation, familiarity, first contact, equity, plus a control/neutral condition with no suggested reasons. Results show that across cultures, children are significantly more consistent and decisive in attributing ownership when one of the protagonists created the object. Development between three and five years is more or less pronounced depending on culture. The propensity to split the object in equal halves whenever possible was generally higher at certain locations (i.e., China) and quasi-inexistent in others (i.e., Vanuatu and street children of Recife). Overall, creation reasons appear to be more primordial and stable across cultures than familiarity, relative wealth or first contact. This trend does not correlate with the passing of false belief theory of mind.