Ownership as interpersonal dominance

Rudmin, Floyd W.

Bibliographic data

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

i He surmised that the referent for the child's first person pronouns was neither the physical object nor the child’s body, but the aroused self-feeling, which would indeed be the same referent for “I”, “me” and “mine” when used by different speakers. | imagine, then, that as a rule the child associates “I” and “me” at first only with those ideas regarding which his appropriative feeling is aroused and defined by opposition. He appropriates his nose, his eye, or foot in very much the same was as a plaything -by antithesis to other noses, eyes, and feet which he cannot control. It is not uncommon to tease little children by proposing to take away one of these organs, and they behave precisely as if the “mine” threatened were a separate object -which it might be for all they know. And as | have suggested, even in adult life, “I”, “me”, and “mine” are applied with a strong sense of their meaning only to things distinguished as peculiar to us by some sort of opposition or contrast. They always imply social life and relation to other persons. That which is most distinctively mine is very private, it is true, but it is that part of the private which | am cherishing in antithesis to the rest of the world, not the separate but the special. (Cooley, 1902, p. 162) These early observations and explanations by James and Cooley have been substantiated by subsequent research in child language development. Bain (1936) replicated Cooley's method and conclusions. McCarthy (1930), with refinement and replication by Goodenough (1938), followed Piaget's theories on egocentrism in children and reported that preschool children used first-person possessive pronouns far more frequently in free-play groups with other children than in controlled situations with adults. Schachter et al. (1974) analyzed the speech of 170 preschoolers in free-play settings and found claims of possession to increase with age, which the authors linked to improved self-other differentiation. Edwards (1978) made detailed analyses of scripts of child-mother interactions to conclude that chiidren use possession to mean differential privileges of access and use of objects. Charney (1980) and Greenfield (1982) both reported that the earliest and most salient usage of self-referent pronouns is to make claims of possession, typically of objects that do not belong to the child. Deutsch and Budwig (1983) reanalyzed Brown's (1973) child language data to show that two-year-olds use pronouns (“my”, “mine”) when claiming objects and use proper names when descriptively indicating ownership. Golinkoff and Markessini (1980) found that toddlers most easily understood possessive expressions when applied to parts of the person (e.g. “Mommy’s face”) and to alienable objects (e.g. “girl's shoe”). Reciprocal possession of people (e.g. “baby’s mommy”, “mommy’s baby") was less well understood. possibly because control and exclusivity are not clear in those relationships. In a more explicit study of possessions, dominance and the emergence of self, Levine (1983) measured the degree of self-definition of two-year-old boys by mirror self-recognition, pronoun recognition, perceptual role-taking, and pronoun production in order to pair boys of

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