The Two Faces of Ownership: Special Section on (Psychological) Ownership and Economic Decisions has arrived!

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By Bernadette Kamleitner & Stephan Dickert

As the observant readers of this ownership blog are bound to know, many aspects of our daily decisions and routines revolve around questions related to ownership. Sometimes we pay close attention to what is “ours”, other times we have little awareness of and care for whose possession something is, or we freely share consumption goods (such as food), services (e.g., giving someone a lift), and advice. But how can we make progress on a phenomenon that is enmeshed in different approaches and frameworks, we hear you ask… Fret not, because just in time another special section on Psychological Ownership has arrived to save the day and highlight some facets of the phenomenon!

We gladly announce that all the proofs of our special section have cleared the editing stage and that the contributions are now available online (http://www.journals.elsevier.com/journal-of-behavioral-and-experimental-economics/recent-articles/); the journey that we as a team started in 2013, with the workshop on psychological ownership, has made another step forward towards providing us with a better understanding of the multifaceted influences of ownership.

The special section consists of five exciting papers and a short introduction to the topic by us (A big thank you to all contributors, reviewers, and in particular Ofer Azar for making this special section possible!). What we set out to do is to highlight the two faces of ownership, the legal and the psychological, and their various links to an explicitly varied set of economic decisions in an explicitly varied set of contexts. That is precisely what we got. Jointly the contributions manage to sketch large stretches of the vast potential scope of ownership research. The contributions help understand how legal ownership over something changes one’s attitude and treatment of one’s possessions (e.g., Arora, Bert, Podesta & Krantz, 2015), how ownership history (Wang, Ong, and Tang (2015) and congruence between oneself and the consumption good can change how much we value owning something (Thomas, Yeh, and Jewell, 2015), how psychological ownership can be a result of how financial decisions are made (Kirk, McSherry, & Swain, 2015), and whether being ostracized influences psychological ownership (Walasek, Matthews, & Rakow, 2015).

Given the pervasiveness of ownership as a phenomenon, these insights may help us to identify possible implications of changes to everyday life. And changes we see. In a time characterized by demographic change and social mobility, people are confronted with a world in which things constantly speed up: Potential de-individualization can be an ailment resulting from the speed at which our society plows forward. (Psychological) possessions could and are used to act as an antidote that is sometimes within a moment’s reach. It takes less than a second to post something on the internet and make it instantly available around the globe. It also takes less than a minute to order and potentially download nearly any digital product. For some goods, the notion of ownership history has taken on a whole new meaning.

The speed-up is not only digital, with 3D printers up and coming people not only get others to produce their customized designs, they may be able to produce them themselves. Simultaneously, whatever we make is becoming more accessible to the rest of the world than ever before. Products are on the verge of turning into agents. Many products potentially know more about us—and themselves—than we. What does this mean for the legal and the psychological face of ownership? At the recent opening symposium of SCP Vienna questions such as these have been raised. In particular, Russ Belk opened up a debate of the implications of objects becoming human like. What it means to call something our “own” may change rapidly in the future. The more we understand about it now, the better equipped we will be to use it as a key to unlocking implications of trends that engulf us as we speak.

Editor’s note:

  • For references to the articles mentioned in this post, please visit our Links & Resources Section

Exposing myself and my research at conferences – or: I have no dog, but a PhD topic to take care of

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Going to conferences is always exciting (like going to the VHB conference 2015 and participating in the Ownership Symposium). It is particularly exciting, if you are about to present something that is of great importance to you – something like YOUR dissertation project. A project you already spent a lot of thought and effort on (personal investment), you (think you) know the topic very well (intimate knowledge), and to a certain extent you feel like influencing this area of research through your (anticipated) contribution (perceived control). These very well-known experiences (Pierce, Kostova, & Dirks, 2003) of course make your dissertation project something special to you, make you feel like you own this very niche of research interests – it became a reflection of yourself, part of who you are (Belk, 1988). This is what makes presentations so exciting, because it feels like offering something private and very personal to others.

However, who really enjoys sharing his/her very personal and intimate details with a rather unknown audience? It might feel like this nightmare, where you are standing on a stage and suddenly notice that you are naked, finally comes true. The very moment when you present YOUR topic, your own flesh and blood, to a greater audience, you open up yourself for (constructive) critique and, suddenly, you start to totter about your feelings of ownership. Did I really spend enough thought and effort on it? Do I really know the topic well, or do the others know it better? Is my expected contribution really as impactful as I thought it might be? In essence, when you present your topic, you let others tackle your knowledge about, your investment in, and your influence on your research area. It might be like your feelings of ownership for your research and topic are questioned.

But why at all do I voluntarily face or even seek these confrontation(s)? I suspect that I have been tricked by ownership, as my answer to this question is – because it is MINE (my dissertation topic). It is mine and I want to take care of it, I am proud of it, I feel responsible for it and no matter what, I will try to do the best for it. Even if this means that I have to undergo potential embarrassing and uncomfortable situations. I will go and take the extra step, neglect related costs and focus on the benefits. At the end we, my project and me, will mutually prosper from being exposed to “our community” (the scientific community) and flourish from the feedback we will get. Somewhat this makes me feel a little like a new dog owner, but instead of a dog, I have a PhD topic to take care of and instead of the veterinarian, I visit conferences.

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She’s Proud of It: Psychological Ownership in a Digital World

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colleeen_momMy mother is 83 years old and loves her iPhone. She prides herself on her ability to use it, explore it, and discover new apps, features and functions. Her self-confidence in uncovering new features is not particularly high, and it is easier for her to appropriate new functionality when one of her kids shows her what to do. But once she has adopted it, she makes it her own, telling anyone who will listen about her newfound feature or app. She considers herself highly innovative among the senior set, as she has friends who do not even use email, much less voice-controlled texting. When she is relaxed and has time on her hands, such as when we are out to lunch together, she is insistent that we download the latest Uber app* for her or show her a new gadget on her phone. However, when she has a deadline, as she still does these days as she is revising a paper for a journal or preparing a lecture on her latest musicology research, her beloved technology can be annoying and frustrating, and she has no interest in exploring or new appropriation.

My coauthor, Scott Swain, and I study this process of technology appropriation among consumers of all ages. How do we come to experience a sense of ownership (Pierce, Kostova, and Dirks 2003) of intangible goods such as digital content or technologies? Under what conditions does a sense of ownership emerge? What are the outcomes? And what are the individual differences among us that enhance or detract from this process?

In one of our recent articles with James Gaskin (Kirk, Swain, and Gaskin 2015), we argue a key emotion that plays a role in the emergence of psychological ownership in a digital context is pride. While pride is felt and displayed in the body as a unitary emotion, it actually has two facets which depend on how consumers attribute its source (Tracy and Robins 2007). When my mother works hard to learn a new app, as she has done in mastering the ability to “call an Uber” when she needs it, she is experiencing authentic pride, attributed to her effort. On the other hand, if she thinks about how much better she is than her senior friends at using technology, she might attribute her success at using the app to this superior ability and a touch of hubristic pride might creep into the mix. We look at this consumer technology appropriation process through the lens of customization or self-design (Franke, Schreier, and Kaiser 2010; Moreau and Herd 2010), arguing that as consumers invest themselves in learning and interacting with digital technologies, the process is a kind of experienced or unintentional self-design. This investment of self elicits authentic pride which enhances psychological ownership.

The social aspect of digital technologies also plays a key role in the emergence of psychological ownership. Pride is a self-conscious emotion which is activated more strongly in the presence of others. For example, as consumers, as we think about creating content that is seen by others, this opportunity to validate our identity in a digital realm (Karahanna, Xu, and Zhang 2015) or even co-construct an aggregate extended self with others (Belk 2013) results in feelings of pride. When we attribute this pride to our own efforts, our sense of ownership of the digital content is enhanced. At the same time, when hubristic pride is an outcome, we enhance ourselves by valuing psychologically owned content and technologies more highly and telling other people about them.

Scott and I have conducted a number of studies that examine these and other ideas experimentally. We have found that we as consumers will experience stronger feelings of ownership of interactive digital content when we are motivated to enjoy ourselves than when we are trying to accomplish a specific task. But this depends on the connectedness we feel with others who may also be occupying the same digital space. We have also found that simply perceiving the opportunity to interact with digital content may be sufficient to elicit psychological ownership, depending on how involved we are with the subject matter at hand. Interactivity becomes a way to “touch” (Peck and Shu 2009) the intangible. We are also exploring the role of both facets of pride and how focusing on self versus others may have an impact.

Psychological ownership has piqued the interest of marketing researchers recently, and for good reason (Jussila et al. 2015; Kamleitner and Feuchtl 2015). Feelings of ownership have a strong effect on important marketing outcomes, such as product demand (Fuchs, Prandelli, and Schreier 2010), economic valuation (Brasel and Gips 2014; Shu and Peck 2011), and word of mouth (Kirk, McSherry, and Swain in press). While researchers are beginning to get a handle on the emergence of psychological ownership among consumers of tangible goods, Scott and I are trying to uncover an understanding of how consumers come to experience psychological ownership in an intangible digital world. Given the accelerating role digital technologies are playing in our lives, we may all have something to be proud of.

*Uber is an American international transportation network company headquartered in San Francisco, California. It develops, markets and operates the Uber mobile app, which allows consumers to submit a trip request which is then routed to sharing economy drivers (for more information visit www.uber.com)

Editor’s note:

Keeping up with the Joneses: Thoughts About Income Inequality, Status Competition and Psychological Ownership

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Like many of the members of this blog, I am interested in theories that attempt to capture the cognitive and affective components of psychological ownership. I believe that an important avenue for future research is investigation of the role of our possessions in the dynamically evolving socio-economic context. I would therefore like to use this opportunity to highlight a potentially interesting new angle in studying the role our belongings play in our lives. A growing body of empirical evidence shows that there is a strong negative relationship between income inequality and various indices of societal well-being. Income inequality is seen in distributions of income if a large proportion of income is received by a small percentage of the population, leading in turn to even greater wealth inequalities. For example, in a highly unequal country such as USA, the wealthiest 1% possess approximately 40% of all the wealth. Contrary to the predictions of economists, the money does not flow from the richest to the poorest, and income inequality worsens with time. Why is this an important issue? A great deal of evidence now shows that when large gaps in income and wealth exist between the richest and the poorest, society suffers from a range of socio-economic maladies. Income inequality is positively associated with the number of teenage pregnancies, homicides, imprisonment rates and obesity. At the same time, it is negatively correlated with social mobility and general level of trust in a society. For a great review I would recommend an excellent book by Wilkinson and Pickett (2009 – reference at the bottom).

In my research, I have been particularly interested in the psychological mechanisms that may explain the impact of inequality. One account is based on status-seeking tendencies. Some theories, such as the social rank hypothesis (Brown, G. D. A., Boyce, C. J., & Wood, 2014; Walasek & Brown, 2015), argue that when income distribution is more unequal, income becomes a better signal of our social status. What follows is that inequality will promote positional consumption, whereby people spend more time and effort to seek high-status goods. In order to “keep up with the Joneses” people become more materialistic, surrounding themselves with fancy cars (Bricker et al., 2014), bigger houses (Cynamon & Fazzari, 2013), luxurious brands (Chao & Schor, 1996). In fact, evidence from economics shows that in order to afford these goods, people work longer hours (Bowles & Park, 2005). Nonetheless, they are still more likely to take on debt (Perugini, Jens, & Collie, 2015) or declare bankruptcy (Alvarez-Cuadrado & Attar, 2012). According to the social rank hypothesis, focus on status consumption takes away from other important aspects of life, such as efforts to promote a healthy social relationships or looking after one’s own health. In one of our recent studies, together with Gordon Brown (2015), we have shown that when income inequality is high, people search Google for luxury brands and products, such as Prada, Gucci, Chanel, fur vests, jewellery etc. Thus, when distribution of income in a society is unequal, people become more interested in status competition, which is reflected in their interest in positional goods.

How this is all related to psychological ownership? As income inequality becomes recognized as a serious challenge to the well-being in our society, the role our possessions play in our lives may be changing. Many theories of psychological ownership maintain that belongings play an important role for our self-identity, satisfying many critical psychological needs (Pierce & Jussila, 2011). What happens when the utility of our belongings comes from the role they play in status competition? If we spend our money to show off our new watch or fur coat, are we unavoidably less attached to these goods? Or, perhaps, do we develop feelings of ownership towards objects while they allow us to signal our status, with these feelings dissipating when we realize that the good is owned by everyone else? Since these goods are quickly dispensable, being replaced by newer and swankier models and brands, it seems that there is little space for psychological ownership to develop. I should note that this issue is not just related to materialistic consumption but to positional consumption. For the former, owning material goods presents value in itself. For the latter, utility from owning a good comes from the fact that few others own such possession.

These and many other questions make me wonder about the ever-changing meaning of ownership in our society. It reminds me of an excellent talk by Russell Belk at the Vienna Ownership Workshop, who presented compelling evidence that the sense of owning changes (if not depreciates) with the growing popularity of shared goods and services (Belk, 2010). I think that more work needs to be done in order to explore how the concept of psychological ownership changes along with the values in a society that are determined by the socio-economic circumstances.

Perhaps this research has been already done and I am just not aware of it. Just let me know if this is the case.

Editor’s note:

That’s MY Beer: Locale, Ownership and a Little Story about the German Beer Market

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Location, location, and location. That’s the mantra of marketers all across the world. However, we might not always appreciate the importance of location for business. In particular, we often ignore the social and psychological aspects of locality. Yet, locality is about much more than just geographic distance. Locale refers to social dimensions such as the role of space in our everyday activities. It suggests that the closer something is to our everyday activities, the more likely it is that we will form a connection to that something. The idea of a sense of place on the other hand suggests that we experience some things as psychologically closer to us than others. That is, these things have more emotional value to us. Importantly, both locale and the sense of place are key to understanding how consumers come to pay attention to products, services and brands.

A recent intellectual discovery is that locale and a sense place are also important for feelings of ownership a consumer may develop for different products and services. By feelings of ownership we mean the psychological state in which an individual feels a material or immaterial target is “mine” and part of “me.” The connection of proximity and “mine” may be that things located on and “growing from” a territory we know and understand both in terms of geography and culture may more easily fall with the realm of our psychological ownership.

Take for example the German beer market, which is well known to rely on the concept of regionalization as evidenced in the popularity of local craft breweries. When the production of beer is located in the consumer’s own territory, there is more readily the possibility that the consumer will experience a closer connection to the products of that brewery. This is even truer for beer brands that emphasize their regional character and corresponding values. Consider, for example, the meanings the inhabitants of picturesque Potsdam associate with Potsdamer Stange – a regional specialty of the area. The producing company strongly emphasizes the 200 year history of this light wheat malt that has a very special balanced taste to it, as evidenced in a recent field study by the authors. It is possible that for many Postdamer the Stange is familiar and provides a sense of home – it is “their” beer. In may well be that as part of the equation these people experience their impact and effort in their neighborhood as extending to the local brewery through various community processes – thereby contributing to the sense of ownership for the local beer.

This trend of regionalization can in fact be seen on other markets. Even globally operating brands capitalize on these effects by offering the sense of home in an increasingly globalized world. For example, why is it that US consumers tend to rather often select home brands when traveling abroad? We believe that selecting a brand they feel is “theirs” provides them with a sense of home and security. In other words, such brands serve as a psychological risk management strategy in the global context. There are spaces to dock your self to every once and while when exploring the unknown territories.

– Iiro Jussila (Lappeenranta University of Technology, Finland) and Marko Sarstedt (Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg, Germany)

May we introduce: Floyd Webster Rudmin

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“I was trying to find the cultural and cognitive foundations of possession and ownership.”

We have yet another addition to our Featured section to announce. This time we had the great pleasure to chat with a true legend of ownership research: psychologist Floyd Webster Rudmin. With his diverse background in philosophy, audiology, social psychology, law and business he managed to approach the topic of ownership and possession from a variety of different angles. The entrance to psychology of ownership and possession, however, was via political philosophy, not via consumer behavior nor via law. He was particularly inspired by the debate of communal vs. private ownership throughout history (Plato’s analysis and Aristotle’s evidence in the 5th century BC, holocultural sociology (sampling cultures) in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and saber-rattling nuclear missiles in the 1950s-1980s).

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In his featured interview, which you can read here, Floyd talks about his personal path, important works that inspired his career, as well as his opinion on the future of ownership. Click here for the full interview.

Excited to Foreshadow

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As many of you will have come to realize, 2015 appears to become the year of special issues on ownership. The topic is bound to leave a mark on or even enter the research agenda of many additional scholars in the near future. This is exciting and we hope to bring many of them together on this blog. The future of blog contributions looks bright. I am pleased to foreshadow a couple of upcoming posts.

We are excited to announce that the proofs for our special section on Ownership in the Journal of Behavioral and Experimental Economics have already been sent to the authors. A sneak preview is soon to follow.

The special issue on Psychological Ownership in Marketing in the Journal of Marketing Theory and Practice is even one step further. It is out now and digitally available. Marko Sarstedt, one of the key figures behind this special issue, has kindly agreed to share his take on the insights the special issue provides us with. Marko has been known to many due to his intense engagement with partial least square analyses. He is not new to the ownership community either. His interest in psychological ownership has created a discussion platform that I fondly remember. Last year he, together with Colleen Kirk, organized a special session on the topic at the 2014 Academy of Marketing Science (AMS).

Colleen, too, has kindly agreed to join us as a guest blogger and to share some thoughts that her intense engagement with psychological ownership has inspired. We are very excited to have her. She is the only person who has managed to contribute to both special issues. Given that the deadlines were not too far apart this really is a noteworthy feat.

So stay posted and of course post yourself or let us know if there is anything you want to share about ownership. And as always, if you haven’t yet become a “face of ownership” but would like to, simply drop us a line with your photo attached.

Best, Bernadette

To Have Or To Be: Upcoming Symposium at the 77. VHB Jahrestagung

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We are delighted to announce that our proposed symposium on ownership with the title “To have or to be: the influence of (psychological) ownership on economic behavior” has been accepted for participation at the 77. VHB Jahrestagung at WU Vienna from May 27 – May 29, 2015.

The symposium will highlight the role of the psychological experience of an object as MINE or OURs in economic decision-making and discuss its breadth from various different lenses. More information on the speakers and the topics will follow soon. A short abstract summarizing the contents can be found in our event section here.

Reminder: CFP on Consumer Ownership & Sharing – April 1, 2015

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We would like to remind you that the submission deadline, which is April 1, 2015, for the special issue on Consumer Ownership & Sharing in the new Journal of the Association of Consumer Research is approaching fast.

The second issue of the very first volume of this brand new journal of the consumer research field is edited by non others than Russell W. Belk and Linda L. Price. Empirical and conceptual papers are sought addressing aspects and issues in the areas of ownership and sharing by consumers. All relevant theoretical perspectives and empirical methods are welcomed.

More information can be found in our Call for Papers section or by downloading the corresponding PDF right here.

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May We Introduce: Ori Friedman

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“I believe that the nature of ownership is something we need to discover through research—not something that can be stipulated in advance. ”

We are happy to announce that we got the chance to talk to yet another great personality, who we would like to introduce to you in our Featured section. Ori Friedman is a truly inspiring and dedicated researcher who got involved in the topic of ownership when he was studying people’s mental states and realized that many interesting elements were equally related to children’s reasoning about ownership, a topic that hardly anybody looked into at the time.

Unlike our previous candidates, Ori approaches the topic from a purely psychological perspective and demonstrates how diverse and broad the topic can be. Receiving his PhD in psychology at Boston College, he is now an Associate Professor at the University of Waterloo, Canada and mainly involved in social cognitive development, conceptual development, and related topics. More specifically, he investigates how children and adults reason about ownership of property, pretense and fiction.

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In his featured interview, which you can read here, Ori talks about his interests and research foci,  about the complexity of the topic and reveals his take on the future of ownership. Click here for the full interview.