Ownership as interpersonal dominance

Rudmin, Floyd W.

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Book

Document type:: Book

Collection:: POP - Possession, Ownership, Property

Title:: Ownership as interpersonal dominance: a history and three studies of the social psychology of property

Author:: Rudmin, Floyd W.

Year of publication:: 1988

Language:: English

Subject:: Besitz Eigentum Sozialpsychologie

Topic:: C - Psychology

Shelfmark:: C/R916 O9

Access:: Free access

DOI:: https://doi.org/10.48671/pop.AC14489044

155 THESIS DISCUSSION The primary goal of this thesis was to demonstrate that, psychologically, owning is not only a material relationship between an owner and the property owned, but also an interpersonal relationship between the owner and the non-owners. In particular, it was hypothesized that interpersonal dominance is psychologically a component of the concept of ownership. This hypothesis has been substantiated by four sources of evidence: 1) the historical record of psychological explanations of property, 2) a multi-cultural archival study, 3) a multi-sample psychological study, and 4) a cross-cultural field study. The convergence of evidence from these four sources will be briefly reviewed. The introductory history traced five psychological explanations of ownership from Greek antiquity to the present, and in each of these, interpersonal dominance was shown to have played a role. The very fact that dominance has been a part of different psychological explanations of property made by psychologists in different traditions of scholarship over an extended period of history gives credence to the hypothesis. To refresh that history and to highlight interpersonal dominance, each of the five explanatory traditions will be briefly summarized. The first explanation is that property is a part of the self. Although ancient Greeks such as Pythagoras, Plato, and Aristotle considered ownership to be a product of self-regard, it was not until the seventeenth century that the physiological psychologies of Malebranche {1674/1963) and Hobbes (1650/1839) explicitly based property on the passion of self-regard and superiority. This was transmitted and developed in the British empiricist and utilitarian traditions; for example, Stewart (1829) argued that the motive for owning was the power that comes with exclusive possession. William James (1890) secured the idea that property is an extension of the self, especially an assertive and ascendent self. From this came empirical research by Cooley (1902), Furby (1980), Levine (1983) and many others showing that the development of the self and of self-referent language is strongly facilitated by dominance conflicts over the possession of objects. Prelinger (1959) showed that the degree to which sbjects control others correlates with the psychological proximity of the objects to the self. The second historically extant explanation of property is that it is biologically innate, either as an instinct for hoarding and grasping or a species tendency for hierarchical social

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