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Appendix B 
Pilot Study 1: Scaling the Criteria 
Purpose: The identification and the expression of the 
list of plausable criteria in Appendix A were developed by 
one man, the experimenter. The goal of this pilot study was 
to obtain subjects' reactions to this list. More 
particularly, the goal was to give subjects a task involving 
the list, and then to ask them about additional criteria and 
about the adequacy of the wordings of the labels and the 
example expressions. 
Method: Two different tasks were performed by two 
different groups of subjects. Both groups judged each of 
the 40 criteria for its reasonableness and force as an 
argument that something is owned by someone, and both groups 
answered follow-up questions on the difficulty of the task 
and the clarity of the wordings. . One group of 30 
undergraduate students (21 females, 9 males), with a mean 
age of 21, judged the criteria individually on a 9 point 
scale, from "weak" valued 1 to "strong" valued 9 . The order 
of the criteria was uniquely randomized for each subject. A 
second group of 40 undergraduates (31 female, 9 male), with 
a mean age of 21, judged the criteria in pairs, deciding 
which one of the pair was more reasonable and forceful, and 
to what degree. Responses to this dominance scaling