At the core of Boyer's model lies the idea that ownership intuitions result from the interaction of two cognitive systems: One dedicated to handling conflicts over the access and use of rival goods, and another dedicated to sustaining cooperative interactions. Under this account, ownership intuitions spontaneously emerge from combining two types of input representations, respectively tracking an agents' resource control and their cooperative potential. This claim can be leveraged to generate novel predictions for the developmental emergence of ownership attributions, which I discuss below.
Two lines of evidence are relevant to this discussion. On one hand, there is currently no clear experimental evidence that infants ascribe ownership relations, intended as stable agent–object associations capable of surviving disruptions of physical control and temporary possession changes (Blake & Harris, Reference Blake and Harris2011). While such empirical gap should not be interpreted as evidence of absence, it nevertheless begs the question whether the concept of ownership is within the province of infant cognition. On the other hand, there is a burgeoning literature showing that infants are adept interpreters of interactions based on the transfer of objects (e.g., giving, taking, sharing; Geraci & Surian, Reference Geraci and Surian2011; Tatone & Csibra, Reference Tatone, Csibra, Denison, Mack, Xu and Armstrong2020; Wang & Henderson, Reference Wang and Henderson2018a) or their competitive acquisition (e.g., priority of access; Mascaro & Csibra, Reference Mascaro and Csibra2012). This evidence suggests that a cognitively frugal concept of possession as relative resource control (based on geometric proxies such as relative distance from an object) is available from early on to understand a variety of (antagonistic and altruistic) interactions. Thus, even without a concept of ownership as socially acknowledged right of use, infants can infer the goals of some (but not all, e.g., lending) types of material transactions. Just as importantly, infants also form expectations about appropriate resource allotment in social interactions: They infer that agents who worked together toward a common goal should share the resulting rewards (e.g., Vorobyova, Reference Vorobyova2021; Wang & Henderson, Reference Wang and Henderson2018b); that differential contributions to a task should be reflected in proportional dispensation (Sloane, Baillargeon, & Premack, Reference Sloane, Baillargeon and Premack2012); that third parties should rectify acts of taking violating equity principles (Stavans & Baillargeon, Reference Stavans and Baillargeon2019); and so forth. This work suggests that infants use estimates of cooperative value (e.g., two agents collaborating) to update representations of potential resource conflict (e.g., only one agent seizes control of the product of joint labor) compatibly with a principle of effort compensation, where the short-term utility of monopolizing material rewards is traded off for the long-term utility of incentivizing the participation to cooperative ventures.
Would such events license infants to ascribe ownership to the agents over the resources acquired? In other words, would infants come to expect that the rewarded agents have enduring rights of use over the dispensed items? Existing studies cannot directly answer this question, as they do not measure infants' expectations beyond distributive outcomes. However, Boyer's claim about the minimal determinants of ownership intuitions suggests that the answer may be a positive one. After all, the scenarios discussed here fulfill the two-pronged premise of his model, since they features cues of resource conflict (i.e., multiple agents seeking finite resources) as well as cues of cooperative potential (i.e., these agents standing in a collaborative interaction). The combination of these cues should then, as per hypothesis, deliver ownership intuitions.
However, ownership concepts are not required to interpret cooperative interactions according to a retributive logic – or, differently put, to generate expectations about the patterning of reward distribution among agents (be this synchronic, as in the case of dividing a resource lot, or diachronic, as in the case of repaying previous material favors through reciprocation). If infants can represent transfer events (Tatone, Geraci, & Csibra, Reference Tatone, Geraci and Csibra2015) and produce expectations about welfare-levelling acts of generosity (i.e., who should give back to whom?; Tatone & Csibra, Reference Tatone, Csibra, Denison, Mack, Xu and Armstrong2020), all by simply updating possession relations based on relative resource control, there is no principled reason why they would not use this same mechanism to draw inferences about the resolution of mutualistic endeavors. Thus, while Boyer's model suggests ownership intuitions to be automatically supplied when agents coordinate over resource use, the argument offered here regards these intuitions as unnecessary to understanding how coordination for mutualistic ends is brought about.
This leaves us with two possibilities regarding the fate of Boyer's hypothesis in early social cognition. Perhaps Boyer is right, and we simply lack an experimental approach adequate to support his hypothesis. If so, given appropriate testing, we should eventually find that infants interpret resource access as granting rights of use functionally akin to ownership selectively when this constitutes a socially coordinated outcome (either produced in collaborative settings, e.g. joint action, or in competitive ones, e.g. dominance). Alternatively, Boyer's hypothesis may not find its footing in infant cognition, if it turns out that socially coordinated resolutions to resource conflict merely result in new configurations of basic possession relations. This possibility opens up an interesting puzzle: If infants do not need an ownership concept proper to reason about how resources should accrue to agents based on their prior interaction history, which other aspects of social living should motivate them to eventually adopt such concept? Tentatively, I would argue that a possible answer lies in appreciating that objects generate prospective utilities, not tied to their immediate use, but to their enduring access. Tools are an egregious example of this kind: Lending them when not needed allows have-nots to reap immediate utilities from their use at no cost for their makers, yet enduring ownership ties need to be established and recognized for the original possessor to reinstate prerogative of access when necessity arises (Ichikawa, Reference Ichikawa1995). Under this conjecture, the developmental emergence of a concept of ownership may then require an additional input representation over the two suggested by Boyer: Namely, a utility function that incorporates future resource fruition.
Irrespective of which of the two scenarios will be empirically vindicated, Boyer's model remains a critical catalyst for both: Either by suggesting a new hypothesis about the cognitive prerequisites for ownership attribution or by highlighting a developmental dissociation between forming expectations about the resolution of episodic distributive dilemmas, which may not necessitate an ownership concept, and representing diachronically enduring associations between objects, such as tools, and their manufacturers, which may.
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At the core of Boyer's model lies the idea that ownership intuitions result from the interaction of two cognitive systems: One dedicated to handling conflicts over the access and use of rival goods, and another dedicated to sustaining cooperative interactions. Under this account, ownership intuitions spontaneously emerge from combining two types of input representations, respectively tracking an agents' resource control and their cooperative potential. This claim can be leveraged to generate novel predictions for the developmental emergence of ownership attributions, which I discuss below.
Two lines of evidence are relevant to this discussion. On one hand, there is currently no clear experimental evidence that infants ascribe ownership relations, intended as stable agent–object associations capable of surviving disruptions of physical control and temporary possession changes (Blake & Harris, Reference Blake and Harris2011). While such empirical gap should not be interpreted as evidence of absence, it nevertheless begs the question whether the concept of ownership is within the province of infant cognition. On the other hand, there is a burgeoning literature showing that infants are adept interpreters of interactions based on the transfer of objects (e.g., giving, taking, sharing; Geraci & Surian, Reference Geraci and Surian2011; Tatone & Csibra, Reference Tatone, Csibra, Denison, Mack, Xu and Armstrong2020; Wang & Henderson, Reference Wang and Henderson2018a) or their competitive acquisition (e.g., priority of access; Mascaro & Csibra, Reference Mascaro and Csibra2012). This evidence suggests that a cognitively frugal concept of possession as relative resource control (based on geometric proxies such as relative distance from an object) is available from early on to understand a variety of (antagonistic and altruistic) interactions. Thus, even without a concept of ownership as socially acknowledged right of use, infants can infer the goals of some (but not all, e.g., lending) types of material transactions. Just as importantly, infants also form expectations about appropriate resource allotment in social interactions: They infer that agents who worked together toward a common goal should share the resulting rewards (e.g., Vorobyova, Reference Vorobyova2021; Wang & Henderson, Reference Wang and Henderson2018b); that differential contributions to a task should be reflected in proportional dispensation (Sloane, Baillargeon, & Premack, Reference Sloane, Baillargeon and Premack2012); that third parties should rectify acts of taking violating equity principles (Stavans & Baillargeon, Reference Stavans and Baillargeon2019); and so forth. This work suggests that infants use estimates of cooperative value (e.g., two agents collaborating) to update representations of potential resource conflict (e.g., only one agent seizes control of the product of joint labor) compatibly with a principle of effort compensation, where the short-term utility of monopolizing material rewards is traded off for the long-term utility of incentivizing the participation to cooperative ventures.
Would such events license infants to ascribe ownership to the agents over the resources acquired? In other words, would infants come to expect that the rewarded agents have enduring rights of use over the dispensed items? Existing studies cannot directly answer this question, as they do not measure infants' expectations beyond distributive outcomes. However, Boyer's claim about the minimal determinants of ownership intuitions suggests that the answer may be a positive one. After all, the scenarios discussed here fulfill the two-pronged premise of his model, since they features cues of resource conflict (i.e., multiple agents seeking finite resources) as well as cues of cooperative potential (i.e., these agents standing in a collaborative interaction). The combination of these cues should then, as per hypothesis, deliver ownership intuitions.
However, ownership concepts are not required to interpret cooperative interactions according to a retributive logic – or, differently put, to generate expectations about the patterning of reward distribution among agents (be this synchronic, as in the case of dividing a resource lot, or diachronic, as in the case of repaying previous material favors through reciprocation). If infants can represent transfer events (Tatone, Geraci, & Csibra, Reference Tatone, Geraci and Csibra2015) and produce expectations about welfare-levelling acts of generosity (i.e., who should give back to whom?; Tatone & Csibra, Reference Tatone, Csibra, Denison, Mack, Xu and Armstrong2020), all by simply updating possession relations based on relative resource control, there is no principled reason why they would not use this same mechanism to draw inferences about the resolution of mutualistic endeavors. Thus, while Boyer's model suggests ownership intuitions to be automatically supplied when agents coordinate over resource use, the argument offered here regards these intuitions as unnecessary to understanding how coordination for mutualistic ends is brought about.
This leaves us with two possibilities regarding the fate of Boyer's hypothesis in early social cognition. Perhaps Boyer is right, and we simply lack an experimental approach adequate to support his hypothesis. If so, given appropriate testing, we should eventually find that infants interpret resource access as granting rights of use functionally akin to ownership selectively when this constitutes a socially coordinated outcome (either produced in collaborative settings, e.g. joint action, or in competitive ones, e.g. dominance). Alternatively, Boyer's hypothesis may not find its footing in infant cognition, if it turns out that socially coordinated resolutions to resource conflict merely result in new configurations of basic possession relations. This possibility opens up an interesting puzzle: If infants do not need an ownership concept proper to reason about how resources should accrue to agents based on their prior interaction history, which other aspects of social living should motivate them to eventually adopt such concept? Tentatively, I would argue that a possible answer lies in appreciating that objects generate prospective utilities, not tied to their immediate use, but to their enduring access. Tools are an egregious example of this kind: Lending them when not needed allows have-nots to reap immediate utilities from their use at no cost for their makers, yet enduring ownership ties need to be established and recognized for the original possessor to reinstate prerogative of access when necessity arises (Ichikawa, Reference Ichikawa1995). Under this conjecture, the developmental emergence of a concept of ownership may then require an additional input representation over the two suggested by Boyer: Namely, a utility function that incorporates future resource fruition.
Irrespective of which of the two scenarios will be empirically vindicated, Boyer's model remains a critical catalyst for both: Either by suggesting a new hypothesis about the cognitive prerequisites for ownership attribution or by highlighting a developmental dissociation between forming expectations about the resolution of episodic distributive dilemmas, which may not necessitate an ownership concept, and representing diachronically enduring associations between objects, such as tools, and their manufacturers, which may.
Financial support
This work was supported by a European Research Council Advanced Investigator grant (#742231 “PARTNERS”).
Competing interest
None.